What brings Z to this restaurant for the fifteenth time in the fifteen days since his plan’s implosion (through explosion) and the betrayal of all he held dear is his weak stomach. It isn’t weak in the traditional sense. For the sensitivity is in spirit, not digestion.
Under unbearable pressure, plotting an escape from his self-inflicted bind, Z found he desperately needed to eat the comfort foods that calm him and remind him, from the inside out, of his real and true self. When expecting one’s own unexpected demise, isn’t it fair to keep taking a favorite last meal, until it proves to be just that?
So Z further risks his already-imperiled life, unnecessarily exposing himself daily for a plate of hummus and a little chopped liver, for some smoky eggplant salad, a kibbeh, and a fat square of salty feta. He will—marrying together the two halves of his self—have a warm pita and a basket of rye bread, which is exactly what he orders from the waitress who is busy writing it all down in her pad. Taking her in, he acknowledges that—along with food—he has another kind of terrible weakness. It is that he also falls easily, and hopelessly, in love.
She is beautiful, dark skinned, and dark eyebrowed, and has above her perfect lips the tiniest black down of hair, the faintest of mustaches, that makes him think she is the most perfect woman he has ever seen. After he’s done mangling the French language in his attempt to order, she shakes her head and addresses him in English. His heart melts again.
“My French is almost as bad as yours,” she says, with a barely perceptible accent that leaves him melted into a puddle. “This will be better for us both.”
And so he ventures it. “Italian?” he says.
“Roman,” she says, wiping down his table with a rag and then lining up his silverware with a neurotic flair. When she reaches to straighten the other chair, she picks up and holds out the paper.
“Not mine,” he says.
“Do you want it?”
“I’m staying away from the news these days. In any language.”
“Well, my Hebrew is even worse than my French,” she says, and puts the paper back where she found it.
“You’re an Italian Jew?” Z is openly enamored.
“I am,” she says. “And you’re an American?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“And Jewish?”
“It depends who’s asking.”
He crosses the river back to Rue Domat, his alley of a street and one of the quietest in the heart of Paris. A place easy to slip into and out of, a street with access to egress (by foot, taxi, bus, Metro, RER, even by boat), and so sleepy and odd a stretch as to make any aberration stand out. It was the perfect place for an operative maintaining a low profile, and living under a simple cover, to set up shop.
Before things turned sour, it had made Z feel safe when keeping an eye out for enemies from the other side. It served the same purpose now while on the lookout, with much greater angst, for those from his own.
Swiping his fob below the keypad, Z hears the click of the lock and slips through the gate to the building’s archway. He nods at the woman sweeping in the courtyard and disappears into the entrance on the left, taking the stairs two at a time to his second-floor flat.
He makes all the checks of his training, and all the checks he’s amassed from experience, and a mix of those one somehow absorbs and conflates from a lifetime of American movies and TV. Inside his apartment, he peers out the back window that looks from his bedroom onto the courtyard. He finds himself staring down at the top of the caretaker’s headscarf as she sweeps her way toward the rear arch. He then runs to the front window to peer down both ends of the street. No cars, no bikes, nothing but the man who sits on his red suitcase, begging, at the point where the block elbows with Rue des Anglais.
Z has dropped two euros into the man’s cup every morning he’s been in town from the day he moved in and occasionally asks a question and hands the man a twenty-euro bill. He has been grooming him for the day he might need to know something good.
Satisfied nothing is amiss, Z strips down to his skivvies and gets in bed to lie on his back and stare up at the ancient rough-hewn beams of his ceiling, looking for patterns where there are no patterns, losing himself in the gnarls that interrupt the grain.
It’s his main form of entertainment since being viciously awoken to the consequences of what he’d done, for Israel, for Palestine, and, most urgently, for himself. He now sees his actions as a crime of political passion, undertaken in a desperate, last-ditch fugue state and driven by his good-hearted intent to do what’s right.
The first thing he did in the aftermath was go around the flat unplugging telephone and TV and radio. The same went for the cable box and the outmoded Minitel that was already there when he’d moved in. He popped the battery from the alarm clock for no good reason, and, citing personal, murderous precedent, he removed the battery from his cell phone, along with the SIM.
He arrived at his office the next day, sweaty and uncontrollably nervous. He took a nightmarish meeting with his boss and handler and, sensing his paranoia was no longer paranoid, Z stashed his laptop in a drawer of his desk, its new permanent home.
With that, there was nothing in the house that could send or receive a signal, so staring at the ceiling is all he has. That, and a single French novel that he can’t read, left on the nightstand when he’d rented the flat.
As he concentrates on the beams, trying to empty his mind, his thoughts veer to the severity of the situation in which he’s entangled. By now, headquarters in Tel Aviv, and various bureaus around the world, have tallied a good part of the damage that he’s done, combing through the files he’s dumped, the operations he’s blown.
All those angry katsas assigned to the French desk must be falling all over themselves for the chance to torture Z, to find out what he’s shared and whom he has betrayed, to hang him up by his toes, waiting for the secrets to fall out of his pockets like loose change, and then to wring out of him the reasoning behind his unhinged, treasonous exploits.