The Hope

  “And the other times? The times that didn’t matter? Tell me.”

  “Oh, Emily, shut up.”

  With a sudden sober mien, she said, “Wolf, my very dear, do you want to call this off?”

  “God, no. Come on.”

  In the elevator his arm was around her, and he could feel her shivering. There was peculiar excitement in that; he felt at once sorry for her and shaky with a hunger for her.

  “So this is where it’s going to happen?” Emily’s voice shook as they entered a room smelling of Lysol, lit by the red glow of the hotel’s neon sign through the window. “The historical society will be putting up a plaque.”

  “Come here, Queenie.” He tossed their coats on the bed and embraced her, in the blinking crimson light. She responded to his kiss with real enough passion. Virginal nerves going by the board! Gently he began unbuttoning her shirtwaist, passing his hands over slight breasts, beautifully firm under the white silk. She peered at him with great round eyes as his hand moved down a slippery row of pearl buttons. Suddenly she burst into wild giggles, choking, “Sorry, sorry.”

  “Now what?”

  “Two things, darling. You’re tickling me, and you smell like Coca-Cola. Not that it’s an unpleasant smell,” she added hastily, trying to stifle her laughter with a small fist on her mouth. “Come on, why are you stopping? I’m deliriously happy, honestly.”

  The telephone rang. The room was so small that he could reach out and pick it up without releasing her. “Yes, put him on.”

  “Saved by the bell?” she inquired, softly kissing his cheek and his ear.

  “Yes… hello, Sam…. Really? Is that good or bad?” Long pause. He glanced at his wristwatch, holding it up to the red light. “I see. But look, that’s in half an hour…. Well, I may be a few minutes late. Quite a turn of events.”

  He hung up and looked at her.

  “I know, Doc,” she said. “You’re not going to drill after all.”

  “I love you, Emily,” he said, “God help me, I love you, but no drilling. Not tonight. I’m wanted at the embassy.”

  “It’s just as well. This is too squalid even for Queenie. We’ll try again in the Growlery.”

  “Growlery? What’s that?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  ***

  Sam Pasternak was pacing under a streetlamp outside the embassy. “There you are,” he greeted Barak with smoking breath. “The guy changed his mind, we’re to meet him at his house, not here. Rabin’s already there. It’s not far, we can walk.”

  They trudged together along Connecticut Avenue through dirty slush. “Did you manage to reach Yael?” Barak asked.

  “Finally. I gather she’s going ahead with that Beverly Hills shop. The problem is still Aryeh.”

  “I promised Kishote I’d talk to the boy. Did you?”

  “He wouldn’t come to the phone.”

  The President’s deputy special counsel lived in a narrow old brownstone on a side street off Dupont Circle. A prominent Washington lawyer, he was Kennedy’s Jew, so to say, though in print and on television nobody said it. Rabin and the attaché were having drinks with him in a very small book-lined room on the second floor when Barak and Pasternak arrived. Like them, Rabin wore a suit and tie. The attaché, a stout general Barak had served under in the training and doctrine section, was in uniform and looked extremely weary.

  “I don’t suppose you have those excerpts ready,” Rabin said, glancing at Barak’s briefcase.

  “I’ve selected them. They’ll be ready for presentation at our morning meeting”—he turned to the attaché—“if your office will print them up.”

  A growl. “It’ll be done.”

  “What is their thrust?” inquired the counsel. “Do they make a solid case?”

  Barak looked to Pasternak, whose gesture signalled that he talk openly. The discussion of Israeli intelligence that followed was singularly candid. The counsel, a lean man in his forties dressed collegiate style—gray flannel trousers, brown tweed jacket, black knitted tie—got up and walked back and forth in the constricted space. General Rabin, in a characteristic crouch over his perpetual cigarette, said nothing until the counsel turned to him and asked, “Well, I’m convinced, but will this convince the Defense and State people?”

  In his slow low way Rabin replied, “Their job is not to be convinced.”

  “True. I spoke to the President not two hours ago. He’s been following this business very closely.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” said Rabin to the others, managing to sound joyless.

  “Mind you”—the counsel picked up the bottle of Scotch, offered it to the others, who declined, and poured some for himself—“it’s a matter of extreme delicacy. He has to take a world view. Arab good will is crucial to many United States interests.”

  “So we’ve been hearing,” said Rabin from his crouch.

  “Still, you fellows have three things going for you.” The counsel ticked them off on spread fingers. “First, he made a promise to Golda Meir that he’d be sympathetic to Israel’s situation. He keeps his promises. Second, he’s a World War II man, and he remembers how the Arabs played along with Hitler. He doesn’t expect ever to count on them, and he thinks Israel may one day be our ace in the hole in the Mediterranean. Third, he believes the Jewish vote swung the election to him.”

  Faintly brightening, Rabin said, “Then we have a chance, perhaps?”

  “A lot depends on your meeting next Monday with the State and Defense people. They’re sending pretty senior persons to that one. By then they’ll have had a chance to digest Colonel Barak’s presentation, and so will the President.” The counsel gave Barak a friendly yet distant smile. “So, Colonel, deliver!”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  When the meeting was breaking up, Barak said to the counsel, “You’d probably know the answer to this. What’s a Growlery?”

  “Growlery…?” The counsel’s sharp eyes brightened. He snapped back like a contestant on a television quiz show, “Growlery. Dickens. Bleak House. A place where you hole up when you get hopping mad. Why?”

  “Thanks.” Barak shook his hand. “You’re amazing.”

  “English major, Harvard,” said the counsel, smoothing his hair with both hands.

  The embassy car took off with General Rabin. Pasternak and Barak got into a cab with the military attaché. “Why are you so beat?” Barak asked the attaché, who slumped back on the seat, eyes closed. They were going to his apartment to talk over the intelligence excerpts, and the best way to present them to the Americans.

  “You’ll find out. You’ll be up for this job one day.”

  “Not if I can fight it off.”

  The attaché opened his eyes and rolled his head at Barak. “There you’re mistaken. The ambassador makes the official noises, the missions come and go, but this section delivers the goods.”

  30

  The Growlery

  On Monday morning Barak left the hotel in an uneasy frame of mind. Over the weekend there had been no reaction whatever from the Americans to his hard-wrought aide-mémoire, not even hints about its effect from friendly lower-level contacts at State and in the Pentagon. Nor had the President’s special counsel returned General Rabin’s calls. As for Emily, not a peep from her, and telephoning the school had raised only a custodian with a ripe southern accent and no information about Miz Cunningham.

  His unease was not about the aide-mémoire. It presented, he felt, a conclusive well-documented argument for obtaining the tanks. The usual Washington stall about supplying Israel, that her military prowess guaranteed victory in any defensive war, was crumbling in the face of the brute mass of Soviet weapons pouring into Arab countries, and the hard intelligence of Arab officers training in the USSR. In the air the balance was shifting especially rapidly: a hundred Ilyushin bombers newly delivered to Egypt, and MiG-18s and MiG-21s piling up on twenty-seven Arab airfields, far outnumbering the French Mirages based on Israel’s seven fields.
On the ground Israel’s Centurion tanks—numerical disparity aside—were no match for the T-54s and T-55s arriving in Egypt and Syria. A dangerous incentive was developing for a surprise attack on the Jewish State, and a timely supply of American tanks—however few at first—would not only reduce the asymmetry, but send a signal that would cool the atmosphere in the region, and lessen the odds of all-out war. Such was Barak’s case, backed by a sheaf of intelligence annexes and exhibits. It was unchallengeable, he thought, if President Kennedy’s assurances to Golda Meir counted for anything at all. That was the question.

  As the participants walked into a brightly sunny State Department conference room for the showdown meeting, Barak was struck by the sheer pictorial contrast between the sides. He was the tallest of the Israelis, and all the Americans but one State aide were taller than he. The gray-headed, pink-faced army general towered well over six feet; the Assistant Secretary of State was a lean pallid funereal figure at least as tall; and their mostly blond aides and deputies appeared to have been purposely selected to make the Israelis look like squat dark troglodytes, making outrageous demands out of primitive ignorance. Or so it seemed to Zev Barak that morning, and he thought that the Americans’ greetings were ominously toothy and glassy-eyed. He had no feeling of contact with any of them except the general, whose smile was brief and uncomfortable as he shook hands.

  The State man opened by saying that alas, the CIA’s Middle East arms balance estimate directly contradicted Colonel Barak’s eloquent aide-mémoire. He went on to review recent favors shown Israel by the United States, at much risk to its relations with Arab countries: release of the Hawk antiaircraft missile (although delivery would take a while), support of the Jordan water project (although Arab threats to prevent it by force were causing some delay), and so on. About the specific arms requests, he deferred to the army general.

  Next the general informed them that the U.S.A. had no missile boats and no plans to make them; so Israel would have to look elsewhere to counter the Russian missile boats that the Arabs were receiving. As for ground-to-ground missiles, the American weapons were designed for nuclear warheads and not modifiable for conventional warheads, hence unfortunately not available for Israel. Regarding tanks, any transfer of various American models under discussion would have to be subject in the end to political judgments, which were State Department turf, as the general put it, with a gesture at the gloomy Assistant Secretary of State, who sat sucking at a cold pipe.

  These two statements, punctuated by readings aloud of many technical document excerpts, consumed over an hour. In a break for coffee and cookies the black-clad State official, reaching for an amicable tone, brought up his gardening hobby; the unseasonable warm spell that had melted the snow, he feared, might mislead his crocuses into coming up and then being frozen. Pasternak commented that around Washington getting misled by a warm spell and then getting frozen was always a hazard. His gravelly voice and ursine roll of the shoulders brought chuckles, but the Assistant Secretary of State did not laugh, and Barak thought Sam had talked out of turn. When they lined up again at the table in facing chairs, the State man asked an aide to read out a draft protocol summing up the talks and the department’s recommendations, which would go via channels to the President. Of course, he said, he would welcome the Israelis’ comments before finalizing the text. During the reading he gnawed at his pipe, his eyes resting on Rabin’s dour face.

  At the end of the reading, silence.

  “General Rabin?” inquired the Assistant Secretary.

  “Deeply disappointing.”

  “Why? That’s a substantial concession we’ve recommended on the tanks, isn’t it? We thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Forgive me, sir, I’m a blunt soldier. What concession? You require hard intelligence from us on Egyptian tank types and numbers. Meantime, if I understand what I just heard, no tanks for us. How do you define hard intelligence?”

  The Assistant Secretary looked at the handsome blond aide who had read the protocol. The aide said in a Bostonian accent, “Intelligence which the CIA will confirm or accept.”

  “Which could take months to develop,” Pasternak put in. “Or a year, and it’s an elusive criterion at best.”

  “And the proposal to assemble the tanks in Europe, sir,” Barak said, “could mean a delay of years in delivery.”

  “No other way,” declared the general, looking glum, “in existing political circumstances.”

  Walking out of the State Department building into the sunlight, Rabin said, “The mission is not a success, gentlemen.” He added to Barak, “Your memorandum was excellent. The result was decided beforehand.”

  Returning to the hotel after an unhappy postmortem afternoon in the embassy, Zev Barak was astonished by the slam of his own pulse at the sight of a telephone slip in his message box. He read the scrawl and crumpled it.

  “Where can I rent a car?” he asked the desk clerk.

  She stopped filing her nails to stab in the air with the file. “Union Station.”

  ***

  Emily’s auto was waiting in front of the Middleburg post office with lights turned off. He parked the rented car and got in beside her. “Hi, Wolf.” She started the motor. “You made amazing time.”

  “Clear directions.”

  “How goes your mission, dear? I decided not to bother you over the weekend.”

  “That was sensible. On the mission, no comment.”

  “Understood. How much time have we got?”

  “I should be back by ten.”

  “Right. We’re off to the Growlery.” She turned up a dark narrow street, twisted around a couple of corners, and skidded into a two-lane road. “The ice hasn’t quite melted out here yet. Fear not. The school isn’t far.”

  “Emily, what is the Growlery?”

  “Gatehouse of the estate that the school bought. The last headmistress lived in it. Fiona and I use it to get away. Relax, or work, or whatever. We play cards there. It’s nice. There’s a fireplace.” She put a dank hand on his. “Nervous, dear?”

  “Me? Why should I be?”

  “Lovely. I’m not. Cool as a cucumber. Fit as a fiddle. Happy as a clam.”

  “Clams are happy?”

  “Why not? They’re hermaphrodites, aren’t they? They screw themselves. What a wise system! No complications.”

  “Oysters are hermaphrodites, I think,” said Barak. “Not clams. Anyway, hermaphrodites don’t self-fertilize. Not as a rule.”

  “Wow, you’re well-informed! All the straight dope on hermaphrodites. I’m weak on biology. French lit’s my game. Say, guess what? Hiroshima has won a poetry prize. No kidding! He sent me a copy of the book. You won’t recognize his picture on the jacket. He broke his nose in an auto accident, and he’s bald. He looks like Socrates.”

  “Emily, for God’s sake watch the road.” She kept looking at him as she prattled, with eyes that gleamed when cars came the other way.

  “I can drive this road in my sleep. I love you, Wolf. I’m astounded that you came. You Israeli army men are all up to no good. Everybody knows that. I was afraid you might be different.”

  “Shut up, Queenie.”

  “I can’t. This time it’s on for sure, I know, and to tell the truth I’m in acute panic. Here’s the school. See? Just a hop, skip, and jump.” She drove through a stone gateway lit by wrought-iron lamps, and whirled the car to a stop by a wooden cottage. “Growlery. The school’s up there.” She flipped a hand at a large rambling moonlit structure atop a hill, at the end of a winding gravel road.

  Barak was taking off his coat as she crouched by the fireplace, touching off a bright flare of paper and kindling. He said, “So, is this where Fiona and her Reverend do their hootchy-kootchy?”

  “That’s gitchi-gitchi, dear. No, no, Fiona has a house down the road. Her own house, very charming. Make yourself at home.” She turned on one standing lamp and slipped out. The fire took hold, brightening and crackling, with a pleasant woodsmoke smell. The cot
tage had an angular wooden ceiling from which a wagon-wheel chandelier hung, and this main room was lined with books slanting higgledy-piggledy on the shelves. He sat down on a worn upholstered couch facing the fire, and saw on the low table before him a crystal bowl heaped high with pistachio nuts.

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” he called. “I’m fat enough.”

  “Oh, the pistachios? Enjoy, enjoy.” A crash of glass. “Oh, bloody damn, Zev!”

  “Here I come.” In a small kitchen broken glass lay in a pool of red wine. She handed him a bottle. “Here, open this one while I clean up the mess. Some start on our tryst, hey? Egad, do I ever have the shakes!”

  “Brunello, I see.”

  “What else? Go ahead, take it inside. Here are glasses, there’s the corkscrew. We’re going to have a beautiful unforgettable time, even though I’m no marchesa, and there are no candles or roses.”

  As they drank wine by firelight, she gave a lively account of Jack Smith’s wedding in Washington Cathedral to the daughter of one of the town’s rich lawyers. The romance had burgeoned quickly, and the ceremony had been the event of the fall for old Washingtonians. “Patricia’s very gentle and pretty, I’d say she’s beautiful. I like her.” Emily sat on the floor, resting her head against Barak’s knee. “A good horsewoman. The only thing is, she’s crazy. Not crazy like me, I mean that she should be locked away. Once she and I got back from a hunt all sweaty, and we sat in a corner of the club bar drinking Pimm’s Cups, and she told me she had seen a spaceship.”

  He was caressing her hair. “Come on, she must have been kidding.”

  “Positively not. She said she was off by herself looking for shells on a beach in Tortola—that’s the British Virgin Islands—and this flying saucer came whooshing down and threw up clouds of water and sand. Then it landed, and aliens came out.”

  “And what did they look like, little green creatures?”

  “Well, she was just starting on that—she said they were sort of round and doughy—when she saw Jack coming over. She whispered, ‘Not a word to Jack, not on your life, he’ll think I’m ga-ga.’ Well, then they got engaged, and she’s hardly spoken to me since. But she meant every word, Zev. Her eyes got that funny shiny look, you know? Poor Jack!”