The Last of the Wise Lovers (26 page)

   That was the first time in all the
years I'd known him that I saw something of what went on inside him.  It
aroused my pity and my empathy and even made me think that perhaps my
sensitivity, which had always been ascribed to Mom, was actually something I'd
gotten from him.  

Nevertheless, I couldn't help noting, "Mom's
like that, too, disguising her weaknesses pretty elaborately...”

   He sat silent.

   "And you always went along and
covered up for her...”

   "She was also the source of much
good...” he said with a bit of longing.  I guess I must have looked
doubtful, because his longing turned to embarrassment, "... you see, I
wasn't exactly a Don Juan, and she - she was beautiful, cultured, she had class
- I could only dream of a woman like her.  Her attention to me, her
consent to marry me, our life together, your birth - all these
made
something
of me...”  Suddenly I understood a little better the story of their first
meeting, at that exhibition.  It seemed that was the juncture where each
had encountered the road that led to what he lacked most.

   My pensiveness disturbed him.
 He tried to get me to understand some of the anger he felt toward you.

"When I read how he sat across from you and
explained that it was possible to see things a different way, all the while
pumping you for information about Mom and getting you to promise you'd let him
know every step you took...” he slammed his fist into the pile of notebooks.
 "How is it you didn't make the connection between that guy's showing
up at the club and the conversation you'd had from the pay phone not ten
minutes before?"

   No matter how I longed to identify
with him, I couldn't really be angry with you.  The phone rang.  Dad
waited five rings before lifting the receiver.  He listened to whoever was
talking on the other end, uttering only a final, "Good".  

After he'd hung up he said, "In a little
while we'll know what's up with Mom."

   "She's at some sanatorium.
 He sent her...”

  
"Not
any more.  Our people whisked her away from there a few minutes before the
police showed up.  Right now, she's on her way to a plane."

   "What about us?"

   "We wait here."

   "Isn't it dangerous?"

   "Perhaps.  But that's the
deal I was able to strike."  There was a flash of pride in his eyes
and for a moment he seemed like my good old Dad, the hotshot.  "We
don't leave until your mother is in a safe place."

   "What did you promise in
return?"

   "Silence.  We know quite a
bit - you, in particular...”

   "I know very little.  Even
now I still don't know who the driver of the Chevrolet was, who put the heat on
Mom, who...”

   "But you know about
my
activities.  Since the Pollard affair, that's exactly the kind of
information the Americans are itching to get their hands on, and exactly the
kind of information we can't afford to let out...”

   "Does this mean you're putting
the squeeze on your friends?"

   He smiled tensely.  "In a
sense, yes."

   "And they won't take revenge on
you later?"

   "My career is over,
anyway."

   I felt awful.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled, "I...”

   "
I
should have been more
careful."

   I respected him for not blaming the
one who had really betrayed him: Mom.

"Where does she want to go?"

   "I don't know.  She's been
talking about a separation for a long time.  I'm sure she has a
plan."

   Our eyes met.  I'm certain the
same thought passed through our heads at that moment: she hasn't got any plans
and her talk about a "separation" is just a lot of hot air.  He
shrugged his shoulders, got up and turned on the television.

"But where will she go?" I asked.
 The noise of the television drowned out my words.  Suddenly I was
afraid I'd never see her again, and it felt abysmal; like death.  On the
screen a car salesman was extolling the virtues of the new Mazda.

"Turn it off," I choked.

   "The news will be on in a
minute," he said drily, decisively, and I wondered if this was how things
would be from now on, and what would become of us - where we'd live, what we'd
do - and whether it would be possible to get some sort of pardon for Mom after
all.

   Then a picture of the Temple flashed
on the screen.  Dad turned up the sound.  Both of us listened
attentively.  The whole story was there, but with a few essential
alterations: New York City Police had not yet succeeded in capturing the
unidentified youth who had broken into Temple Beth Hashem two days earlier and
shot off a gun in the middle of Rosh Hashanah services.  According to some
of those present, he had shouted anti-Semitic slogans.  Others claimed to
have heard him shout anti-Israel slogans.  He had been detained by
security guards but had "escaped from their custody" several hours
later.  Then came the usual responses: someone from the Israeli Embassy
denounced the event, someone from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
protested, the New York City Police issued an official apology and so on and
on.  No one mentioned Mom, Dad, you, or me.  Dad turned off the TV.

"Not a bad version.  Very smooth.
 And most important: there's no one who can possibly refute it, not even
that poor, confused -"

   "Aunt Ida?"

   He looked at me, uncomprehending.
 "No, that librarian, Miss, uh --"

   "Ms. Yardley?"

   "That's it, Yardley.  We
owe her quite a lot.  She saw you sitting on the library steps when she
left that concert with everybody, and watched you throw something into the
trash.  She waited until you'd gone and then fished out the crumpled
slide, brought it to the police, and lodged a complaint about theft, and
destruction of public property.  Someone there had had enough sense to ask
for the catalog number of the missing slide.  She gave the call letters of
several art and science slides that had been stolen or taken out and not
returned during the last year, but
that
particular slide didn't fit any
of them.  Yardley didn't give up.  She announced that she would not
leave the police station until the complaint had been officially filed.
 The detective who was handling her tried examining the slide under a
magnifying glass, and when he saw the top secret classification he immediately
notified the C.I.A.  Luckily for us, someone managed to warn us in
time...” his fist landed on the mattress, hard, "but
damn
it we
were so close to getting it
all
, and at such a low price...”

   I thought back to our ride to Kennedy
Airport and what he had said
about a `small,
sneaky bunch of bastards' and the threats to Israel's existence.  It
sounded convincing, in retrospect.

He added,
"In a sense, that hurts me even more than what happened to your mother.
 Everything was over between us, anyway, and if she hadn't have fallen in
love with Harry, she would've eventually gone off with someone else... but
professional
betrayal...”

   All of a sudden I didn't understand
what was going on, as if I'd walked in in the middle of a movie.

"Professional?"

   He got up and placed a hand on my
shoulder exactly as you once had, until I suspected he might unwittingly be
imitating what I'd written in the notebooks.

"You don't understand any of this, do
you?"

   I shook my head.

   "Let's start from the beginning.
 Who was your uncle?  How did he earn his livelihood?"

   "Medicinal herbs, vitamins,
health food...”

   He snorted in disdain.
 "Those were just his covers.  The warehouses, the drying and
grinding plants, the groves in South America, the fields in the Far East - they
brought him very little revenue, some years he even lost money on them.
 The thing he really traded was information.  That was what he really
did.  He bought information wherever he had connections, and he also
provided some general services for various agencies - the C.I.A., the NARCS...”
 I tilted my head until my cheek brushed against the hand that was on my
shoulder.  There was a softness in his voice that I'd forgotten, that same
softness which he'd used to tell me bedtime stories so many years before.

"For instance, he'd gather intelligence in
Southeast Asia and pass it on in sacks of ginseng, employ American agents in
his herb beds in Nicaragua or El Salvador, run interference in the heart of his
gargantuan fields in the Andes.  And he wasn't the only one.  The
world of espionage is full of shadowy deals like these: oil companies getting
franchises in places where it's clearly pointless to drill, just so they can
keep an eye on Cuba or Chile or Angola or Yemen; fruit growers planting trees
that will never bear fruit so the internal security system of the groves can
serve as a front-line base for U.S. intervention; ships loaded with garbage
floating around aimlessly or catching fish no one will ever eat just so the crew
can listen in on radio transmissions...”

   I thought about the decorative llama
skin the Indians had given you in appreciation of your work.  Was it real,
or had it been fished out from among the other props in some government
warehouse as part of the game?

"You mean," I sneered, "that the
number one man in the family, the man whose successes in life everyone envied
and coveted, was a petty bureaucrat?"

   "Something like that.  A
government contractor, to be precise...”

   "And no one had a clue?"

   "Mom knew.  Aunt Ida did,
too.  She even told you as much."  He picked up one of the
notebooks and began flipping through it.  "Here, you even recorded it
yourself: `That good-for-nothing!  If he weren't a spy do you think he'd
have a job?'...” he looked up at me, "and you thought that the
`good-for-nothing' was me...”

   I averted my eyes.

   "I guess I sort of neglected my
own PR with you... I always figured we'd have time for that after I'd
retired."

   "After you retired you wanted to
work for
him
."

   "I'm a professional - which
you've seen for yourself.  With my operational ability and his
connections...” he exhaled sadly.  "And he had connections... you saw
the picture he has in his study, of himself with President Truman - he really
was
friendly with Truman.  Truman owned a men’s clothing store in Kansas City
with a Jewish partner.  That's how they got to know each other.
 Harry's personal charm did the rest - along with a little luck, which
seems to have been running out on him lately."

   "You mean his business
headaches...”

   "Oh, there were always business
headaches.  His serious problems were with his
real
client, the
C.I.A., which in the meantime had become a sophisticated, technological
organization run by guys who weren't impressed by a photograph with Harry S.
Truman.  New, younger guys, who believed that one satellite could capture
more than a fleet of agents, that one technician sitting in a plane at 20,000
feet could in one day - and at a nominal cost - get more information than ten
companies and trade posts had in the past.  Harry had become superfluous.
 But the worst thing was that this happened just when he owed money on
several failed investments...” he gloated.  "I imagine he whined and
cried on your mother's shoulder, and since - as you know - she takes pity on
everyone, she must've somehow managed to look through my papers and thought:
`There's so much useful material here; I bet some of it could save Harry.'
 That's how he began handing them their own stuff - stuff I'd procured -
except that he told them he'd gotten it in Asia or South America.  They
started looking for the leak, which made things even tougher for me.  My
sources dried up, informers got nabbed, codes were changed... but, even though
we didn't understand what was going on, we found a way.  Harry became a
hero - at least temporarily.  The checks kept rolling in from Uncle Sam,
enabling him to pay off his debts, aggregate new cash, try, in the meantime, to
sell off the assets that were really his, tie up a few other loose ends, and
plan a modest but comfortable retirement in Florida."

   He took a flask out of his travel bag
and poured some of its contents into the cap.

"Maybe," he continued after downing what
was in the cap, "maybe he wasn't as despicable as he seemed.  Maybe
he thought to himself: `I'm in deep trouble, and there's all that good stuff
floating around - what would be so terrible if I recycled some of it and sold
it back to the guys to whom it belonged in the first place?'"

   The alcohol - or perhaps it was his
pride in the quality of the information he'd gathered - made him seem
conciliatory, almost generous.  A thousand new questions popped into my
head.

"If everything was working out so fabulously
well, and he was just about to retire gracefully, where do the guy from the
Lincoln Tunnel, and the pills, and searching our house, and the riddle - all of
that - fit in?"

   He poured himself another capful.
 It seemed he wasn't really too enthused about continuing the inquiry, but
I couldn't stop myself.

"And what about Mom?"  I tried to
fit the pieces of the puzzle together.  "Was it because she didn't
want him to leave that he tried to perpetuate the illusion that he was in
serious trouble and that he could only extricate himself by leaving?"

   He drained the cap at one go.

"It's even more painful than that," he
said softly.  "She
wanted
to go with him, you see?  She
knew exactly what she was doing, dammit; you're going into the army in another
year, she's got little enough with me, and Harry - you know how he is - all
chivalry and warmth and wisdom... I doubt he had any long-range plans as far as
Mom was concerned.  For him it was just another affair, something
convenient, familial, comfortable, that he'd leave behind - of course - with
his business and the apartment in Manhattan and his other connections.
 But your mother...”  He poured himself a third capful.  I
couldn't help but think how stupid it would be if we were stopped by some
sheriff from some jerkwater Pennsylvania town for `driving under the influence'.