“I do.”
“Then prove it. It can’t be long, this job. A couple of days, maybe a few weeks, at most—and he promises to keep you on the books for a year. No harder than babysitting a sleeping child. Soon as they figure out what to do with their problem, you can go back to watching TV. If you ever do wake up and want to build a future in this country, if you ever want to move out of your mother’s apartment, a nice vague entry on the résumé, and the government payslips to go with it, it will make their minds run wild. You can go to high-tech after this. They’ll think you were a top assassin, or a frogman. They’ll think you’re a hero even if all the General is asking is for you to keep a chair warm. And remember, it’s not the General asking. Don’t even think about him ever again once I hang up this phone—you already promised! Let me hear you say it!”
“I promise.”
“What do you promise?”
“I don’t even remember. That’s how forgotten it is.”
“Good,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “Tell them to call.”
“I already did. Now go watch your show.”
2002, Paris
He really shouldn’t touch that newspaper, and really shouldn’t be in this restaurant again, and definitely should have stayed on his side of the river, keeping to the relative safety of the Left Bank near his home.
In his sorry state, Z has come to the conclusion that he should never have passed any of the battery of psychological exams, that it was odd that he’d been recruited in the first place and ridiculous to have put him in the field. He still likes to believe that there’s always wisdom shoring up the Institute and its secret systems, and imagines his handlers knew his weaknesses at the start but found there was an upside worth the risk.
Now they’re facing the reality of their poor decision and will have to neutralize Z at great expense.
His garroting, or poisoning, or drowning in the Seine, would, in the annals of Israeli espionage, be the same as brushing a little Tipp-Ex onto a form. He is a human typo soon to be whited-out from his line.
He stops himself from following that train of thought any further. Open worry, panicked musings, they change the facial musculature, they make him seem guiltier and more suspect and might, in a weak moment, cause him to forget himself and look nervously around. Were there someone who had not yet spotted him, hunting for such a tell, it would be a giveaway of the most obvious kind.
He thinks it best to focus on respiration. He takes control of his breath, calming himself, inhaling and exhaling in a measured and natural way. He moves from the very-out-of-place Hebrew newspaper on the table over to the cash register, behind which—as per usual—a giant, scruffy man sits, looking like a French-Jewish Cossack.
What is not as per usual is the waitstaff. There is a new waitress—North African, he’d say; also Jewish, he’d say, who faces away from him as she bends over the tubs of hummus and tabouleh and labneh, scooping food onto a plate. There is also a tall and muscular new waiter, who is, on this visit, the person who concerns him most.
The moment that Z entered the restaurant, he noticed the waiter noticing him. The waiter immediately stepped out the side door, texting something curiously short into an already repocketed phone.
From the way the waiter holds himself, Z can tell that he hates his new job, and that he is maybe an actor or a musician, and that he also appears to be gay. Or maybe he is acting gay, and acting unhappy, and acting aesthetically bent so as to camouflage himself among the legion of like-minded Huguenot waiters who want to be singers, or painters, or directors of artsy French films, all of whom can’t stand the tourists and touristy Jews they’re forced to wait on all day in the Marais. It’s their neighborhood now (gay, not Huguenot), and the sooner they close down this little living museum to the shtetl, or pack it up and move it out toward the airport and Euro Disney, the better.
It is the perfect cover, if this waiter-that’s-not-a-waiter was expecting Z’s stomach to betray him yet again. All he’d have to do now is step back outside and press some detonation code into that same phone. The next thing you knew there’d be Turkish salad on the ceiling, and Z spread all over the Rue des Rosiers, ground up into his own personal paté.
Z can feel himself sweating and nearly hits the ceiling when the Cossack at the register asks him politely whether he wants takeout or to sit down.
Z tells him in his bad French that he wants to sit. The manager points to the open table by the window, the one with the paper resting atop. Z takes a seat and, considering the newspaper curiously, as if he’s never seen a Hebrew daily before, picks it up and drops it onto the chair opposite, leaving it hidden from view.
Who brought it? Who carried it here, an edition two days old?
Then he remembers a story they all used to laugh about during his training. A story about one of the terrorist bigwigs whom Israel had tried and failed to assassinate—though not by much. The target had been successfully poisoned, but after weeks laid up in a Damascus hospital, he didn’t succumb.
All the victim knew about his own near-killing, the only thing his doctors could tell him for sure, was that the toxin hadn’t been ingested by mouth but introduced through his skin. He also knew that Israel was surely and actively still trying to see him dead.
What Israel knew was pretty much everything. Where he was at any given moment, whom he met with, and half the things he said. They knew it all, including the protective measures the man now took. Like some poor King Midas, afraid to make gold, this man had ceased to touch anything whose point of origin was unclear. When he got a letter, his most trusted aide stood in the other room and read it through the door. Food was carefully sourced, prepared on premises, and tasted in advance. Toiletries were replenished from a different pharmacy, in a different part of the city, each time. As with the food and the letters, this loyal aide would then run his boss’s Right Guard up and down his own patriotic armpit and floss with the first minty meter of any new wheel. This same secretary also traveled to a new newsstand each and every day for a fresh copy of the paper. Then he’d turn the pages for him, as his fearless leader read.
Recalling this, Z uses his foot to push that chair and that poison paper farther away, feeling his throat go dry. He looks at his fingertips where they touched the newsprint. As the waitress approaches, Z holds them up to the window, looking for residue in the light.