Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  The passport stamping procedure went quickly. This was the first time I’d used a passport that wasn’t my own, and I had a queer feeling. I stood outside the small terminal and a taxi drew up. The driver put my suitcase in the boot, and I climbed into the backseat. As I sat down, the radio blared out, “Yossi calling Shlomo” – in Hebrew.

  I caught my breath. What could this mean? Some kind of a trick? Was the Office trying to see how I would react?

  My driver turned on the ignition and asked, in English, where I was heading. “Holiday Inn” I said, and as he drove off, Shlomo answered Yossi over the radio. My driver ignored them, and called in something in Greek. I heard him reporting his destination, “Holiday Inn.” Then Yossi and Shlomo spoke in Hebrew about a fare, and it dawned on me that my Limassol taxi was on the same wavelength as a Haifa cab company. I chuckled to myself.

  The taxi entered October 28th Avenue, which ran parallel to the seashore, with palm trees and flowerbeds on the central reservation, hotels on the one side and parks, beaches and more hotels on the other. In a minute we were in the Holiday Inn parking area. The hotel was a long, five-storey building right on the beach.

  I asked for, and received a room facing the sea. It was still very early in the morning, and I had to pay a surcharge. I decided to act like a regular tourist and as soon as I had unpacked my bag, I donned a swimsuit and a hotel robe, and headed for the pool, which was located between the lobby and the beach. I put my toe into the water, and it was still icy. I stretched out on a deckchair, closed my eyes and dedicated myself to the morning sun. What a great start to the first chapter of my new life.

  For the next few days I divided my time between the hotel pool and my assignments, until I had executed them in full. These agents of terror didn’t shrink from living the good life. They resided in villas, luxury apartments or the best hotels, something that made my job easier. I devoted several hours to each one of my objects, verifying their addresses and the vehicles they were using. Sometimes I found newer models than those on my list, and then I kept up my surveillance until I was sure that the target was using that car. I updated details about family members that I observed, and in some cases I tailed the object in a car that I’d rented to his first stop, and I added it to the list of their regular haunts. I drove carefully, not feeling too comfortable on the left side of the road, a relic of British rule. Sometimes I misjudged my distance from the kerb and bumped into it.

  I gave the Hamas representative special attention, gathering intelligence information about him that I hadn’t been asked for. Places he visited, cafés where he drank, people he met with. Perhaps it would still emerge that he had been behind the bomb on the No. 4 bus. In that case, I would want to lead the team sent in to eliminate him.

  The Fatah agent was staying at the Four Seasons hotel, at the end of the promenade. I invited myself to the hotel’s private beach, and I saw him twice, once with the Hamas man and once with a call girl who looked like a Russian. In most cases, people don’t look very much like their photographs, with the angle from which they are seen different to that of the camera, or their hairstyle may have been changed, as well as their attire. Pounds may have been added, or lost. Nevertheless, my practised eye picked my objects up quickly. Back when Moshik had shown me the pictures, I had noted characteristics which I could now identify. I took a photo of the Fatah man with his Russian, in case the Office would want to make use of it sometime. As my orders said nothing to the contrary, I decided to indulge myself with a girl like her. After months of sexual deprivation, I thought I deserved it. For a few days running, I’d noticed a good-looking young woman sitting in the lobby of my hotel, and a quick exchange of glances was enough to get her to follow me to the elevator. I already had a raging erection on the way up, and as soon as we were in my room I began to unload all of my accumulated excess baggage, from all possible angles. Only after the third time did I ask her how old she was and where she was from. This abundantly endowed female turned out to be a Moldovan, and she was seventeen. I gave her double her asking price and sent her away.

  I remained naked and ashamed in my bed. So now I was not only an accomplice to human trafficking, I was also almost a pedophile. I realized that after more than a year without Dolly and only isolated and hopeless sexual encounters – there was nothing romantic about them – I had reached rock bottom. The thought that the demands of my job wouldn’t allow me to find a genuine companion and to build a significant relationship made me really despondent. It would be like it had been in the army, when no relationship could survive my protracted absences. When I met Osnat, things seemed to be settling down until I told her I wanted to travel to the Orient after my discharge. Now, I would have to lie, on top of everything else. As long as a girl wasn’t a serious partner, I wouldn’t give her details to the Office for a security check, and even when and if I did so, it would take months before a clearance came through and she would discover I’d been lying to her about my profession since we met. Then, either she would realize this had been a necessity, and accept it or not. But what could I do about it? It looked like the new road I had chosen was a dead end when it came to finding a mate.

  Down in the dumps, I switched on the TV.

  When I had first checked in, I discovered that I could get Israel’s Channel 2, and as soon as the picture cleared, my blood ran cold. This time it was an attack on Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa by a female suicide bomber, and by late that night the death toll had reached twenty-one, with scores wounded. Many of the less badly injured were interviewed in the extended live broadcast, as were relatives of the victims, and I sat there for hours facing the screen, trying to identify familiar faces.

  Again, I was in a dilemma, and again I chose to call home. I waited, sleepless and tense, until the morning, drove to the Sheraton at the marina, and called from a payphone there. My father was awake and answered immediately. All my relatives were all right, but a family who lived near my parents had been badly hit. I had known them all since I was a child.

  I transmitted a message to HQ. Islamic Jihad had taken responsibility, and I knew precisely where their man in Cyprus lived. I could execute a retaliatory hit very quickly. I was ready. In the reply, I was thanked for my reports and told to get set for my trip to Toronto, that same day or the next. The matter was being taken care of. I bit my lip and booked a flight. I could only hope that if they wanted me off the island by the next day, others were on the way to settle scores with whomever necessary, and that I had done my bit by updating the intelligence. I also hoped that when I had completed establishing my cover and could travel the world as a genuine Canadian I, too, would be among the executors. With or without a woman. Apparently without, I had to admit to myself, regretfully.

  4.

  Toronto Debut

  TORONTO GREETED ME with bright but icy weather. When I landed there, in early October, the skies were clear but strong winds from Lake Ontario swept through the streets that led up from the waterfront, and at around five p.m. when it grew dark, emptied the central area and sent people hurrying home. The cold, colours, smells and winds evoked dim memories of the two years I’d spent as a child in Ottawa.

  I bought a long woollen coat, fur-lined gloves, good shoes, a scarf and a hat. When I had been told to get a suit and tie in Israel I felt as if I was masquerading, and now I looked like someone else entirely. The warm clothing made it easier for me outdoors, but the weather still crimped my ability to do what I had to do. At eight a.m. it was still dark, offices opened at nine, and my activities were limited to the mid-day hours.

  After a few days in Cyprus as the Canadian Ron Friedlich, I’d resumed an Israeli identity. I checked into the Town Inn Suites, an apartment hotel near the intersection of Bloor and Church Streets, at the north-eastern end of the central area. Between it and the main tourist attractions stood Toronto University campus, which I had to visit. But first I intended to spend a few days as a tourist both to explain my stay here and to learn as much about the
city as I could before I began my enquiries regarding Ron Friedlich, so that later on I’d be able to pass myself off as someone who had grown up and lived in Toronto.

  Relying on the blue of the sky and misjudging the temperature, I started walking along Yonge Street, which has been called the longest street in the world. I walked towards the centre, getting used to the way locals pronounced its name, as in “young”. The street ran all the way down to the lake, and the wind froze my ears, poked icicles into my eyes, and found its way up my legs, so I went into a clothing store and bought some thermal long-johns. Despite the cold, the street was a lively place and I felt quite elated as I walked along it. It was quite narrow, teeming with cars, streetcars and hurrying pedestrians, and lined with shops of every conceivable kind, with people of different nationalities and skin colours selling goods from all over the world. There was a mixture of older, English-style brick buildings, newer stone-faced ones, and modern steel and glass structures. Music blared from the record shops, smells wafted from the eateries, and multi-coloured items of clothing hanging outside clothing stores waved in the wind, creating a feeling of a perpetual street party. Later on, I understood that the locals tried to enjoy themselves as much as they could as long as there was some sunlight and before winter arrived to put a dampener on everything. When the first sunny days of spring came around, they’d burst out again, in shorts and sandals, openly defying the persistent cold.

  I was about to take refuge from the wind in the Eaton Centre, a large mall flanked by two impressive silvery glass buildings. But just then I spotted the Hard Rock Café hidden away on a corner of the square opposite the mall, and that’s where I hurried to thaw my freezing limbs.

  As I entered, my ears burning with cold, it struck me that since leaving the hotel I hadn’t executed any moves to detect if I was being followed. Although I wasn’t exactly engaged in an operation, I felt I should make sure I was clean, if only for reasons of protocol. I sat down in a corner facing out towards the street and made a mental note of the people looking at the café, those who stopped outside, and also those who entered, especially if I saw they had first surveyed the people sitting inside. Any chance of spotting a tail among them was small.

  I did it again when I left the Hard Rock Café, as soon as I’d turned the corner into Queen Street. Two people came around the corner after me moving fast, one of them a young woman who had also come into the café behind me. She caught my eye, gave me a sweet smile and kept walking quickly. A tail wouldn’t have smiled at me, so I decided I was clean, and because the street was protected from the wind coming in from the bay, I began enjoying myself even more. This was apparently a really old street and it was lined by two- or three-storey brownstone buildings housing little shops and a vast array of restaurants, as well as more modern blocks. Soon, my wandering led me to the Old City Hall, a magnificent palace built of light brown stone, resembling a huge basilica.

  Crossing a large plaza, in the centre of which workers were setting up an ice rink, I headed for the New City Hall, a low, round structure flanked by two curved towers with a space between them, forming a kind of bisected semi-circle. Near the entrance there was a sculpture by Henry Moore, whose work I knew from the sculpture garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. I went to the information desk, and asked when the building was erected; the architecture was so modern that I suspected it was completely new, but I was told it was built in 1965, which meant it had already been standing for some time when Ronald Friedlich was still alive and living in Toronto. I was given some maps of the city, including one of The Path, which is actually a kind of underground city for pedestrians, living and breathing beneath the aboveground one. I decided my ears had suffered enough, and that I’d continue on my way via The Path. But just then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the girl with the sweet smile huddled with two men next to one of the side exit doors of the underground thoroughfare.

  I crossed over to the Sheraton Hotel on the other side of the square, from which I would be able to keep a lookout in the direction of City Hall, and only after no one had come from that direction for a good few minutes, did I descend into the maze of underground tunnels. There were miles and miles of passages that made it possible to get from place to place, sparing pedestrians the need to contend with the weather and traffic in the streets above. The passages were tiled and spotlessly clean and the shops, clubs, bars and cinemas were immaculate.

  It was clear that in order to follow me effectively, a large surveillance squad would be necessary, with one of its members waiting for me at every intersection, and that their only hope, at the morning and evening rush hours, would be for them to stick right up close to my ass. These, therefore, were the hours that I chose when, in the next few days, I used the passages to get to most of the must-see attractions, like the CN Tower, the city’s most familiar landmark – though I assumed that the chances that the local secret service would have me on their lists were minimal.

  My interest in architecture took me to St Andrews Church, a sandstone building to which a modern wing had been added that fitted in nicely with the older part, and to the magnificent Ontario Legislative Building, site of the provincial parliament, a structure that reminded me of the splendid buildings erected in Europe in the nineteenth century.

  For my cover as a tourist, it was important for me to have in my pockets stubs of tickets to various sites, and when the temperature sank I took refuge in museums. I visited AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as the Toronto Art Gallery. The first was undergoing renovations and was partly sheathed in a glass covering, with corridors and staircases of planed wood leading inside, and the second was a strange, black and white checkered box standing on coloured iron legs, atop the original building, something like a futuristic alien who’d come to visit. The outside of the building, it seemed to me, was more interesting than the interior and the contents, and that’s also what I felt about the ROM, the Royal Ontario Museum, on Bloor Street near my hotel, where the architect had designed an annex to the old stone building comprising a striking cluster of lopsided, asymmetrical aluminium and glass triangles.

  I didn’t see the girl with the sweet smile and her friends again, and I assumed they had not been following me, and if they had, they’d been satisfied that my behaviour was that of a tourist and struck me off their list, had I been there to begin with.

  I went to these great, rich museums to help establish my cover story, and only when I was inside did I remember that I had actually been an artist. A painter. A Bezalel graduate. And for a few hours, I went back to being what I had been. Perhaps that’s what I still was, deep down inside, and what I could go back to being, if the world around me would return to being normal. As I was somewhat detached from the avant-garde atmosphere of Bezalel and the artistic scene of its graduates, I found myself interested in and enjoying the pictures by native Canadians, who’d painted in oils or watercolours or made black and grey drawings of scenes from their lives in the northern territories, bear hunts, shark fishing. These were more appealing to me than works made up of, say, boots cast in metal and welded together to create a distorted female form, or a bicycle that had been dismantled and reassembled to look like an elk.

  As part of my plan to build a cover story, I had brought with me a few pictures that I’d made especially for this purpose, nondescript landscapes based on pictures from Canadian magazines, and signed “RF”. I went to some small galleries to try and place them there until they were sold. Success came sooner than I had anticipated; so soon that I had not even rented an apartment, something that my operational orders called for, and I had to give the gallery the address of the apartment hotel. Later, Udi rebuked me for this, and rightly. But I was so elated by this renewed recognition of my artistic ability that at the time I didn’t relate to it as seriously as I should have. I painted more pictures, because the city was speaking to me with all the colours and sights of autumn and early winter, the like of which I had never experienced. I took them
to galleries, and they were gladly accepted.

  Only after a week of being a tourist and getting to know Toronto did I turn to the matter of Ronald Friedlich. I began my search in open, accessible sources, like phone books and municipal records, and went about it very cautiously, after preparing a fairly convincing cover story. I found his parents’ names and their current address, as well as the address of the house where Ron – as I had taken to calling him in my mind – had lived as a child.

  That childhood home was a small two-storey house, a couple of miles from central Toronto, in a neighbourhood that seemed rather poor, and was partly inhabited by Greek and Indian immigrants. The house was on a main street, where streetcars and buses passed by on their way to the eastern suburbs. The houses were close to each other, and were fronted by patches of untended lawn. The Friedlich’s house, now home to an Indian family, was built of dark bricks and had a small attic under its roof.

  I walked around the house, taking photographs and sketching. A boy and girl from the next-door house, with the suspicion of immigrants lacking in self-confidence, asked me what I was doing. I told them I was moving into the neighbourhood and asked where the school was. They were happy to point the way.

  Before going into the neighbourhood elementary school, I decided that if a teacher thought I was the Ron who’d graduated over ten years ago, I’d simply deny it. But that never happened. The corridors were full of immigrants’ kids and the commotion reminded me of my elementary school, which had also been largely populated by a mixture of children from immigrant families and Arabs whose parents wanted to integrate into Israeli society. The atmosphere was nothing at all like I remembered of my two years at the polite, conservative school in Ottawa – mainly the school uniform and the blond hair of my classmates, and one girl with very blue eyes, who gave me my first kiss, the day before my father’s assignment was over and we flew back to Israel. It was a kiss that transformed Canada from a geographical concept to a secret desire, a dream realm which I thought I’d never visit again. And here I was once more, walking around freely in a Canadian school, quite excited.