So why was he running to Didi’s aid again? And why on Earth was he dragging Li with him?
At the prospect of dragging Li into the wake of Tel Aviv, all the guilt and anxiety and self-loathing Cohen had been shoving under the rug for so long rose up to accuse him. And with them came a little shudder of apprehension that he would have called a ghost walking over his grave…if he weren’t himself the ghost of a man whose very grave no longer existed.
Did all spies feel this way? Did they all suffer from the gnawing suspicion that the safe everyday world was just the surface of a deep ocean, and that they would break through the fragile surface tension and drown if the bulkheads they constructed around their separate and conflicting lives were ever breached? At least human spies had the unity of their bodies to fall back on: one brain, one set of memories, and the ironclad physiological conviction that the chaos raging inside their skulls was unique and singular and meaningful. Cohen had nothing to hang his identity on but the spooky phenomenon of emergence. And how long could you survive out there in the lying cold when you were only a ghost to begin with?
At a quarter past five the door at the end of the hall opened and the man they were waiting for emerged.
“Cohen!” he cried. “Welcome home, my friend!” He looked back and forth between the two of them, his eyes bright behind Coke bottle glasses, his normally drawn face wrinkled with a scrappy little boy’s grin. “So which one of you is you?” he asked. “Who do I have the right to kiss, and who do I have to fob off with a handshake?”
Cohen stepped into the little man’s outstretched arms. “You’re perfectly welcome to kiss us both. But me first, please.”
Didi Halevy’s friends said he looked like an out-of-work undertaker. Didi Halevy’s enemies, if they were wise, didn’t say anything. Cohen had once spoken to a katsa who had worked the NorAmArc with Didi when they were both mere field agents. “He ought to be in the dictionary under the word nebbish,” the man had said admiringly. “When Didi walks into a room his own mother would swear someone just left!”
All of which drove home to Cohen just how unhuman he himself was. Because to Cohen, Didi had always seemed more real than most people, not less. And though he and Didi saw each other at rare intervals, and usually only during moments of crisis, there were few things he enjoyed more than an hour spent talking to this extraordinary man who looked so inexplicably ordinary to his fellow humans. Or at least that had been how things stood before Tel Aviv.
“Can we take you to dinner when we’re done here?” Cohen asked Didi.
“No. But you can come to my house for dinner. My daughters are here on their Yom Kippur visas, and Zillah’s always delighted to see you. And of course”—with a polite nod to Li—“the invitation is also for…?”
“Actually, we’ve met,” Li said. “At the War College on Alba. You probably don’t remember, but I took a class the semester you visited.”
“Oh dear. I should remember, of course, but I meet so many people. And my memory for faces is very poor.”
Cohen rolled his eyes and coughed.
“I’m sorry,” Didi said humbly, “it’s dusty in here. All the paper, you know. You wouldn’t believe the problems we have with allergies. Would you like to borrow my eyedrops?”
Didi’s office was material proof of the old Mossad dictum: the smaller the office, the bigger the reputation. The place must have been a mop closet in some prior incarnation. Only the timeless tools of the trade—the glass-topped desk, the paper shredder, the scrambled landline, the dusty green ranks of locked file cabinets—suggested the secrets its walls had seen.
Nor did the room give anything away about Didi himself. There were no family pictures, no knickknacks, no mementos. The only hint of personality was a fading computer printout taped to the wall behind Didi’s head, where generations of young field agents had read it while listening to briefings, waiting for Didi to get off the phone with his wife or daughters, or yawning through administrative updates. The list, which Cohen happened to know had been a present from the last class of katsas Didi took through field training, contained five items:
1. The odds of an agent ending up in a hole in the ground are directly proportional to the number of people who know him from a hole in the ground.
2. The best thing to say is always nothing.
3. When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been.
4. Small guns are more trouble than they’re worth.
5. Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.
As they passed into the office, a slender young man appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to frisk them a second time. Cohen stood patiently to be searched, as did Li; but while Li’s inspection of the boy was limited to a quick glance at all the potential hiding places for concealed weapons, Cohen’s once-over was a bit more thorough.
The boy had the parchment skin and glossy curls of a yeshiva student. His glasses were cheap, like Didi’s, and the lenses were almost thick enough to obscure the long-lashed bedroom eyes behind them. Which didn’t change by one jot the fact that the body under the rumpled suit was a soldier’s body, and the sleepy-lidded eyes looked out at the world with the calculating poise of a professional killer.
Once he’d pronounced them clean, the young man escorted them into Didi’s inner sanctum and hesitated ostentatiously.
“Thank you, Arik,” Didi said. And waited.
The boy heaved a sigh of protest over the security breach and slipped out of the room, leaving the three of them alone together.
“Good youngsters coming in these days,” Didi told Cohen. “It’s a nice thing to see kids who take their work seriously.”
“Well, you do get the pick of them.”
“You want a boy like Arik should be rotting in a foxhole? Five languages he speaks. Arabic like a native.”
No doubt he did speak five languages. He also looked like a smaller, paler, less handsome, and decidedly less good-natured copy of Gavi Shehadeh. But Cohen knew better than to suggest that this might have anything to do with Didi’s obvious affection for the boy.
Didi chatted on, mentioning mutual friends. Cohen let the small talk flow over him without too much thought—something he’d long ago learned to do when humans started talking this way—and focused on the body language. He’d wondered for a long time what Catherine Li and Didi Halevy would make of each other. Now he watched each of them summing the other up and asked himself whether these two particular opposites were about to attract or repel.
Li, three years out of the Peacekeepers, still looked so ill at ease in mufti that even the most casual observers pegged her for an off-duty soldier. Didi, by contrast, had looked like a disheveled impostor the one time Cohen had seen him in uniform. In fact, one of the often-discussed mysteries of the Mossad chief’s legendary career was the question of how a man who seemed too fragile to lift a piece of paper had survived his compulsory military service long enough for his unique talents to be recognized.
At the moment Didi was definitely in undertaker mode. If Cohen hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were talking to the janitor. Did the man have some reason for wanting Li to underestimate him, Cohen wondered, or was it just the habitual camouflage of an old spy who’d long ago learned not to trust new faces?
Li, meanwhile, had gone into her full-blown dumb-soldier act. There was no glint of humor in her dark eyes, no ironic drawl in her voice. Not one thing about her face, manner, voice, or words suggested that she’d ever had an intelligent thought in her life.