“We’ve been having a lot them lately.”
“The doctors in Paris and Amsterdam had long nights recently, too.” He tilted his head to one side. “I assume you followed the news of the bombing in the Marais quite carefully.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“Because you’re French.”
“I’m Israeli now.”
“But you retained your French passport after you made aliyah.”
His question sounded like an accusation. She didn’t respond.
“Don’t worry, Natalie, I’m not being judgmental. In times like these, it’s best to have a lifeboat.” He placed a hand to his chin. “Did you?” he asked suddenly.
“Did I what?”
“Follow the news from Paris?”
“I admired Madame Weinberg a great deal. In fact, I actually met her once when she came to Marseilles.”
“Then you and I have something in common. I admired Hannah a great deal as well, and it was my pleasure to consider her a friend. She was very generous to our service. She helped us when we needed it, and a grave threat to our security was eliminated.”
“Is that why she’s dead?”
“Hannah Weinberg is dead,” he said pointedly, “because of a man who calls himself Saladin.” He removed his hand from his chin and leveled his gaze. “You are now a member of a very small club, Natalie. Not even the American CIA knows about this man. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” He smiled again and took her by the arm. “Come. We’ll have some food. We’ll get to know each other better.”
He led her across the veranda and into a shaded garden, where a round table set for four people had been laid with a traditional Israeli lunch of salads and Middle Eastern dips. At one of the places sat a large, morose-looking man with closely cropped gray hair and small rimless spectacles. Natalie recognized him at once. She had seen him on television rushing into the prime minister’s office in times of crisis.
“Natalie,” said Uzi Navot, rising slowly to his feet. “So good of you to accept our invitation. I’m sorry about showing up on your doorstep unannounced like that, but that’s how we’ve always done things, and I believe the old ways are the best.”
A few paces from the garden stood a large barn of corrugated metal, and next to the barn were pens filled with cattle and horses. A pie slice of row crops stretched toward Mount Tabor, which rose like a nipple from the tabletop flatlands of the valley.
“This farm belongs to a friend of our service,” explained the one who was supposed to be dead, the one named Gabriel Allon. “I was born right over there”—he pointed toward a cluster of distant buildings to the right of Mount Tabor—“in Ramat David. It was established a few years after Nahalal. Many of the people who lived there were refugees from Germany.”
“Like your mother and father.”
“You obviously read my obituary quite carefully.”
“It was fascinating. But very sad.” She turned away and stared out at the land. “Why am I here?”
“First, we have lunch. Then we talk.”
“And if I want to leave?”
“You leave.”
“And if I stay?”
“I can promise you only one thing, Natalie. Your life will never be the same.”
“And if the roles were reversed? What would you do?”
“I’d probably tell you to find someone else.”
“Well,” she said. “How can I possibly turn down an offer like that? Shall we eat? I’m absolutely famished.”
18
NAHALAL, ISRAEL
THEY HAD PLUCKED HER FROM the overt world without a ripple and smuggled her to their pastoral secret citadel. Now came the hard bit—the vetting, the probing, the inquisition. The goal of this unpleasant exercise was to determine whether Dr. Natalie Mizrahi, formerly of Marseilles, lately of Rehavia in West Jerusalem, was temperamentally, intellectually, and politically suited for the job they had in mind. Unfortunately, thought Gabriel, it was a job no woman of sound mind would ever want.
Recruitments, said the great Ari Shamron, are like seductions. And most seductions, even those conducted by trained intelligence officers, involve a mutual unburdening of the soul. Usually, the recruiter cloaks himself in a cover identity, an invented persona that he wears like a suit and tie and changes at a whim. But on this occasion, in the valley of his childhood, the soul that Gabriel opened to Natalie Mizrahi was his own.
“For the record,” he began after settling Natalie in her seat at the luncheon table, “the name you read in the newspapers after my alleged death is my real name. It is not a pseudonym or a work name, it is the name I was given at birth. Regrettably, many of the other details of my life were correct as well. I was a member of the unit that avenged the murder of our people in Munich. I killed the PLO’s second-in-command in Tunis. My son was killed in a bombing in Vienna. My wife was gravely wounded.” He did not mention the fact that he had remarried or that he was a father again. His commitment to truthfulness went only so far.
And, yes, he continued, pointing across the flat green-and-tan valley toward Mount Tabor, he was born in the agricultural settlement of Ramat David, a few years after the founding of the State of Israel. His mother arrived there in 1948 after staggering half-dead out of Auschwitz. She met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the Hebrew name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but one child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of God, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel’s visions. And then she promptly turned her back on him.