“It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Hirschman.”
She said suddenly, “You didn’t give them something to drink?”
He answered quickly in Hebrew at which she just waved her hand. “Can I get you boys something?”
“Whatever you have would be fine,” Woods said for both of them.
“How about some lemonade?”
“That would be great.”
“So you met her,” Mr. Hirschman said.
“Yes, sir, but I only saw her once,” Big said, trying to participate.
Jacob Hirschman pointed with a crooked finger to a picture frame on a corner table by the couch. “There she is,” he said.
They both looked where he was pointing. “She was gorgeous,” Woods said.
Jacob nodded his agreement, smiling just slightly with the corners of his sad eyes.
The picture captured Woods’s attention. He crossed to the table and picked it up. Something was different. He looked at her smiling face and her dark hair. Her hair was shorter in the picture, she was a little thinner… Suddenly he noticed her hand. It was completely normal. Woods looked at Jacob. “Her hand.”
“Yes. It was a tragedy.”
“What happened? I thought it was from birth…”
Jacob was puzzled. “Oh, no. Only for the last eighteen months. Since the accident.”
Woods looked at Big, who was very confused. He asked Jacob, “What accident?”
“The one where her hand was hurt.”
Woods waited. He had a strange feeling he was opening a door he hadn’t even known was there.
Jacob shrugged. “I don’t really know. She didn’t talk about it.”
“Did it get caught in something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she working at the time?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But she was a schoolteacher. What could—”
“A what?”
“Schoolteacher.”
The old man’s bushy eyebrows lifted in confusion. “Why do you say that?”
“That’s what she said.”
“She never taught school,” he said with finality.
“What did she do?”
“She worked for the government.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not really sure. All she ever told me is it was the defense department. It was her business.”
“Was she working for the government when her hand was injured?”
“Yes, of course.” Jacob paused. He spoke to Big. “So you two are pilots.”
“Yes, sir,” Big said. “We’re stationed on the Washington. We pulled into Haifa this morning.”
Miriam came back into the living room, bringing the lemonade. She gave each of the men a tall cold glass and then sat in the only empty seat, a cloth-covered chair with shiny spots from years of use. “It was very nice of you to come and see us,” she said “We don’t get many visitors in white uniforms from the American Navy.”
“Thank you for having us,” Woods replied. He sipped his lemonade and complimented Miriam on the flavor. “I was just telling your husband, Tony Vialli was my roommate. I wanted to come see what he saw, and visit where he went.”
“That’s nice…”
“In fact, I got a postcard from Tony just the other day. It took a while for the mail to get there. It was from Nahariya.”
They smiled weakly, remembering.
“It was sent the day before he and Irit went to Tel Aviv for her interview.”
Miriam looked at Jacob. “What interview?”
“With the airline. El Al,” Woods said.
“She didn’t have any interview.” She looked at Jacob. “Did she?”
“No. What interview? What for?” he asked.
“Flight attendant.”
They both looked mystified. “No, she didn’t have an interview.”
“Then why was she going to Tel Aviv?”
“She didn’t say, really. I guess she wanted Tony to see some of the sights. And I think she had some business.”
Woods’s mind raced around considering the implications. “Government business?”
“I suppose.”
“She still worked for the government?”
“Of course.”
“And that was one of the reasons she wanted to go to Tel Aviv?” Woods drank from his glass. “Well, that’s interesting. But it probably doesn’t mean anything. Tony must have misunderstood her.”
“Yes, that must be it.”
“Well, we don’t want to take up all your time. We were on our way to see where Tony and Irit were murdered,” he said. The words chilled them.
“Why?” Miriam asked, her eyes moistening as her husband fought back his own emotions.
“I have to. I owe it to him.”
“Not much there,” Jacob said.
“You’ve been there?”
He shrugged.
“When?”
“When it happened.”
“Were you glad you went?”
He sighed. “I’m not glad about anything. I’ve lost too much. You have children?”
“I do,” Big said as Woods shook his head.
Jacob looked at Big. “Ever lost any of them?”
“Only in the store,” Big said, smiling, then immediately regretting it.
“She was everything to me. I don’t know how to say it.” He drank his lemonade with a shaking hand. “She was the family. It is the only thing you leave… You know what I am saying?” he asked anxiously. “When you leave the world, you leave only your family. Even then, after fifty years, nothing. But at least for fifty years, you have people. You made a difference.”
Woods didn’t know what to say. Then to Jacob, “Would you like to come with us?”
Big stared at Woods, his eyes enlarged in warning.
“You mean to where it happened?”
“You’ve been there. You’d find it faster than we ever would.”
Jacob looked at Miriam, who smiled gently at him. She said, “I can’t, Jacob, it’s too hard for me. But you go if you want.”
“All right,” he said. “You stay here tonight. I will drive you there first thing in the morning. Tonight, I will tell you stories about Irit, my little girl. Our only daughter.”
“So?” Ricketts asked, somewhat annoyed that he had to ask at all.
“So what?” Kinkaid replied. He had gone over to the DO, out of the task force area, to find Ricketts. Kinkaid had gone to the Director to talk to him about Ricketts. He had a bad feeling about Ricketts’s mission. He had to acknowledge to himself that it was probably because he didn’t know how the mission was to be carried out. But there was something else about it that gnawed at him. He had asked the Director of Central Intelligence, who was in charge not only of the CIA but all intelligence, to read him into Ricketts’s mission. He had refused. Not only had he refused but he said that the agreement he had with Ricketts was that no one else could be read into that mission, and Ricketts had to be personally notified if anyone else even asked to be read in. The DCI had told him that he now had to notify Ricketts of Kinkaid’s interest.
The idea had made Kinkaid so angry he had almost quit the Agency on the spot. He was fed up with the distrust, the over-the-top concern for secrecy, especially when it involved an area that was supposed to be under his control as the head of the task force. It drove him nuts. He was able to extract one promise from the DCI though, one that he thought might just drive Ricketts crazy — which at this point would be okay in Kinkaid’s mind — the right to decide whether Ricketts could go at all. The go, no-go decision was Kinkaid’s. Just as Ricketts had implied when they’d talked in the parking lot. Kinkaid knew Ricketts had pulled that early morning stunt just to imply that Kinkaid had the power, knowing all the time that only Ricketts and the Director really had the clout to call off the mission. He had made Kinkaid lower his guard by making him think he had power he never really had. Well, now he did.