The doorbell sounded again, for longer this time: an intrusive, angry noise.
Colin knew he must phone the police, why the hell hadn’t he done it before? But not on the hallway extension, because the person outside would hear. So that meant going to the kitchen, at the back of the house, away from the attackers. Away from Halib.
As he reached the passage, the doorbell sounded yet again. Robbie pressed his hands more tightly over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. He was shivering. Colin caught hold of his son’s arm and began to guide him slowly toward the kitchen.
Then, behind them, he heard the letter flap click open. He thrust Robbie forward as hard as he could and was about to run after the terrified boy when a voice said, “Colin? Are you in there?”
A woman’s voice. For a fraction of a second he thought it was Leila’s. Then he recognized it: Angie Belmont, the downstairs tenant.
“Oh, my God,” he cried aloud. “Thank you, thank you!”
He took Robbie by the hand and hurried to open the front door.
“Angie,” he said, “am I glad to see you!”
“What’s wrong? You look like you’d seen a ghost or something.”
“Never mind. Robbie and I are going to the police.” “Gulp!” The girl pushed a tangle of black hair out of her eyes. “I need walnut oil and you talk police. Anything I can do?”
“Yes. Watch our backs as we walk to the car. If you see anything you don’t like, any little thing at all, run into your apartment, bolt the door, call the police, and make them believe it’s an emergency. It will be.”
“You’re in trouble?”
“Yes.”
“’Kay.” Her face, normally dreamy, had assumed formidable purpose. “Here’s what we do. Get to the car, pronto, and I’ll ride shotgun.”
When Colin gazed uncomprehendingly, Angie laughed. “I’ll be in my car, right behind you, till you get to the precinct house. Anybody tries to mess with you, I’ll ram ‘em!”
The prospect evidently pleased her. It pleased Colin, too, never more so than when they got to the end of West 79th in time to see a black stretch limousine pull out from the curb ahead of them, its boomerang-shaped aerial floating above the trunk like a mini-tailplane.
They sat Sharett down in a pantry, off the Katzes’ main kitchen, and while they harangued him they walked up and down, gesticulating.
“Raful,” Aliza cried in near despair, “why won’t you see it? We have to get Moshe out of here now, this instant!”
“She’s right.” Neeman’s machine-gun delivery contrasted starkly with Aliza’s measured diction, stick versus carrot, good cop and bad. She was a nice girl, Raful liked her; pity about the skin. … “Let’s review,” Neeman said. “It was you had the tip-off, so you got to be
katsa,
to run the operation. None of us quarreled with that. Secrecy, you said. No outsiders,
Al,
strictly and only
Al.
One bodyguard for Moshe, one only; don’t scare away the bad guys, lure them on, make them think it’s easy. Textbook stuff. Classic. But it fell apart, and upstairs we have one very vulnerable ambassador who knows that whatever deal Raful struck with him, this wasn’t part of it.”
Sharett sat in the straight-backed chair they’d given him, legs crossed and hands clasped in his lap. He kept his head up and his eyes to the front. Aliza and Neeman stopped pacing, they threw up their hands, they “tcha’d” as mothers do when their daughters refuse to eat.
“So why not just take him away?” Raful asked.
“Because,” Aliza said, just like that same mother—only she didn’t say, Darling, you are beautiful the way you are, truly, she said, “Because, Raful, he won’t make a move without your approval, and you won’t give it.”
Sharett did a Raful, lighting up the room, and Aliza gritted her teeth.
“No,” she said. “You listen to me. Moshe deserves better. He agreed to leave himself wide open in New York, and now you’re the only help he’s got. He is the ambassador to the United States of America, the only one
we’ve
got.”
Raful looked between them, then allowed his stare to resume its neutral, forward-facing position. “Is Stepmother here?”
“No,” Neeman said.
“Anything on where she is?” Raful inquired of the space between their bodies.
While Aliza continued to marshal arguments, Neeman spoke into his shortwave radio. The exchange was tense and brief; in less than a minute, Neeman had returned to the fray.
“Vanished,” he said curtly. “Raful, she was diversion; now she’s gone. She has left, the stage is now clear for act two; she is not
in
act two, Raful, but the curtain’s going up right now
and we have to get Moshe out.”
Raful continued to survey the opposite wall with a thoughtful expression on his face, as if he were counting the knives in the rack or estimating how old the plumbing might be. And what was he really thinking, as he kept his head up and his eyes wide open, innocent?
He was thinking how right these young people were, how clever in their analyses, and he was so proud of them.
He had kept this operation all to himself, because he knew it meant the end of Leila and Halib Hanif; he knew he could kill them both, with his bare hands; he would get that opportunity, as long as, if only, Moshe agreed to cooperate. Moshe had agreed; his army of minders had been stood down for the weekend so as not to frighten away the foxes. Now all of them were out on the thinnest of limbs, a gale was whipping up, it was too late to bring in the FBI. There was only one thing left to do. He must get Moshe out, alive, in one piece, and then he must start putting together a story that might, just conceivably, save his pension. Again.
That’s what he must do.
Supposing he didn’t?
He was playing with Moshe’s life. The stake didn’t belong to him, and it felt
good.
He wouldn’t be the one to suffer terminal inconvenience if things went wrong. This is how Leila Hanif feels, he told himself, when she’s about to detonate the bomb.
In that sliver of time he saw exactly where his soul was and knew he couldn’t afford to let it stay there.
He stood up. He ran his hands over his hair a couple of times while he tried to think of a cute exit line to cover things over. Nothing occurred to him.
Just get Moshe out of here.
He cleared his throat; but then Neeman’s short-wave radio squawked and Raful paused, glad of the respite. He watched Dannie’s face, saw its expression change from severity to astonishment.
“Leila Hanif.” Neeman’s voice no longer rattled along. It had turned hesitant.
“What about her?”
“She’s just arrived. She’s upstairs.”
In front of Leila, tall purple drapes had been drawn aside to frame the entrance to an oak-paneled room, and above the heads of the guests she could see a fireplace, ornate and huge, before which stood a number of imposing-looking men, deep in conversation.
“Have you ever met the Israeli ambassador?” Geula Katz asked.
Leila vigorously shook her head. “Oh, my goodness me, no. Colin and I, we’re not"—a nervous laugh—"we’re not ambassador people.”
“Well, it’s time you changed, honey.” Geula Katz clasped Leila’s wrist. “Now you come right this way this instant, and I’ll introduce you.”
Under the exuberant guidance of Mrs. Katz, she passed through the drapes and found that in here things were much quieter. She had finally attained the inner sanctum. The holy of holies.
Casually she undipped her crocodile purse, leaving it open a fraction.
“He is
the
sweetest man,” Geula said. “Come.”
A commotion behind her: argument. Leila, concentrating on the ambassador, didn’t turn, not even when the voices at her back seemed to become aggressively loud. Two members of Moshe’s circle, sensing another presence, made way for her while continuing to pay heed to what the ambassador was saying. Then Moshe himself turned to bring her into the ring, and as he did so cast a glance over Leila’s shoulder. She was aware of his face changing, losing its amiability at a stroke, but her handbag was open now and she had come to within three feet of Israel’s ambassador to the United States; nobody stood between her and him, one on one at last—
Then a young man she remembered vaguely as having been in the synagogue, remembered because he had paced up and down the aisles throughout shul, ran by and blocked her route to Moshe. Leila halted, drew back; but a woman had taken her left arm and was squeezing it painfully, while the man she’d seen in the synagogue grabbed her hand.
“Raful!” the young man cried over Leila’s shoulder. “Stay back! No!”
Leila tried to turn to see who he was calling to, but the woman tightened the grip on her arm and she winced. The room fell silent for a second. Then came frightened whispers, one or two screams. “He’s got a gun!”
Leila opened her mouth to yell and she
did
yell… no, not her voice. Someone else had shouted, “Don’t!” The woman who was still gripping her arm, she was the one who’d shouted. Suddenly this woman let go of Leila and darted behind her.
A bullet flew up into the ceiling.
Guests hurried in from the outer rooms, blocking the doorways, making a din, but around the fireplace there was silence, nothing but silence, while people gazed stupidly at one another.
There was a scuffle, the sound of somebody being hurried out of the room. Leila guessed the gunman must have been overpowered. She stood there with her mouth open, and the bemusement on her face was genuine.
Neeman quickly knelt down to pick up the crocodile purse that Leila had dropped when she was seized.
“Empty,” he muttered, as he stood up. “Look.”
Aliza took the purse. With Neeman watching over her shoulder, she upended it. A twenty-dollar bill, loose change, and a single tissue floated to the ground. Aliza ripped out the silk lining. Nothing. No weapon, no gas, no poison pill. A bag full of nothing.
“Now just a minute.” Yehoshafat Katz interposed himself between Leila and Aliza. “Who do you think you are?” he demanded of the latter.
Moshe took him to one side and whispered something. Katz’s eyes widened, but when he turned back to Aliza he said, “She’s a guest, and a friend of my wife’s. You’re neither. If you’ve got business with her, you can conduct it, without guns, in private,
if
she consents. Understand me? I will… not… have violence in my home!”
Leila stared at him. She knew they all expected her to say something, but she had no script.
“I don’t know what all this is about,” she said in a high, clear voice. “But as long as someone will volunteer as chaperone, I don’t mind being searched. It’s the quickest way to prove I don’t have anything to hide.”
Aliza murmured something to Neeman, then turned to Geula. “Will you help me by chaperoning this woman?” she snapped.
“How could anyone refuse such a charmingly expressed invitation?” Geula led the way back through that succession of beautiful rooms like Catherine the Great, with Leila, Aliza, and Neeman floundering in her wake.
A servant intercepted her with a murmured message. “Wouldn’t you just know it?” Geula pouted at Leila. “Now the darn phone’s out. Okay, Consuela, go phone the police from next door.”
At last they emerged onto a landing and Geula made to climb the curving stairway to the upper floor, where the bedrooms were.
“Hold it there!”
Sharett’s voice. He was being restrained by two men. They held him against the banister, a few steps down from where Neeman and the three women had just emerged. Seeing he had everybody’s attention he yelled, “This woman is a terrorist, come to kill the ambassador…
citizen’s arrest!”
The two men, startled, loosened their grip on him, not much but enough for Raful to twist and punch his way free. He hurled himself at Leila, made a grab for her arm, and next second was pulling her down the stairs. Aliza protested, but he shouted at her in Yiddish; and Neeman, without a trace of hesitation, scampered ahead, clearing their path to the front door.
Leila tried to snatch a glance at her captor’s face, but he was looking down the stairs so she couldn’t make out his features. Sharett had gotten her halfway down to the ground floor before she began to struggle in earnest. She kicked him and he yelped. Leila, seeing him distracted for a vital second, bit his wrist and he let her go. She ran on down, had nearly reached the bottom, when the front door flew open, three loud bangs followed on each other in rapid succession, and the hallway filled with smoke.
Amid the screams and pandemonium Sharett saw just one thing: his quarry was getting away. He jumped the last few steps, keeping his eyes fixed on Leila’s back. As he reached the bottom he tripped over something and fell, realizing too late that Neeman lay half on the floor and half on the lowest step, one hand held to his shoulder. Raful picked himself up and carried on.
Halib Hanif, flanked by two other men, was in the doorway, with Leila pressed against his chest and a stubby machine pistol in his right hand.
“You bastard!” Sharett yelled.
Halib, looking as cool and elegant as a man off to Henley Regatta, grinned at him. Above the tumult, Sharett heard him say, modestly, like somebody disclaiming a compliment, “Well, yes"; he watched as Halib lowered his gun to horizontal, taking aim, felt the first bullet strike … then Halib was making for the stairs, at the top of which stood the Israeli ambassador to the United States of America.
From outside came whistles, more gunfire. Halib faltered and wheeled around; his men did likewise, their faces slackening with fear; then suddenly they were in disorganized retreat, and the hallway was empty of everything except smoke that wreathed higher and higher, up the stairwell, to where horrified spectators lined the banisters.
The pain in Sharett’s leg exploded into agony. He fainted.
He came to in the little room off the main kitchen, where he’d sat earlier, listening to Aliza and Neeman explain the only course open to him.
“Moshe?” he breathed.
“Safe,” Aliza replied. “The police arrived just before you collapsed. Nobody here called them—the phone line had been cut at the junction box; it was an outside call—I don’t know who or why. You’re finished, Raful. You are dead. You’ve endangered the special relationship and State is mad as all get out. No one’s to know.
No one.
The blackout is to be total; now do you understand?”