Chapter 4

I sat on a white-painted iron bed in the dark, deeply confused. Outside, muffled conversation went on for an hour before the lights flicked off. I had placed my feet up on the bed and had almost fallen asleep when the door peeked open a half hour later.

“Okay,” Yael whispered. “She’s a heavy sleeper but ... please, really quiet.”

I gathered up my things and followed Yael through the door. We shared a silent elevator ride to the lobby.

“I’m really sorry,” Yael repeated in the warmth of the street, below the apartment.

“I felt that you were ashamed of me.”

“No.” She touched my arm. “Really, no.” Took a breath. “Liora – that’s my roommate – well, we, have a kind of relationship.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not like that,” she said quickly. “It’s not exclusive. But we have an agreement: no boys at our place. It’s ... our space, you know? And I couldn’t be seen with you at the hotel. The owners are Orthodox; I’d be fired on sight.”

“So you don’t – I mean, you don’t make a habit of –”

“Picking up goy guests from the hotel?” She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “No.”

“Sorry. I just –”

She sighed. “No, I’m sorry. I had a really great time with you, and I didn’t want it to end.”

“So.” I looked down the street, hoping that the GettTaxi she had summoned wasn’t already on its way. “I can see you again?”

She tilted her head. “Maybe. How long are you staying?”

“At least five weeks.”

“There can’t be anything at the hotel.”

“Of course.”

“But I’ll talk to Liora. Maybe we can ... make an exception.” She smiled, and rose on her toes, kissing me. “And I do owe you. That wasn’t how I wanted the night to end.”

“Me either.” I turned, seeing the lights of a car sweep over the block, approaching the apartment. “I’ll be back and forth a lot of the time,” I said quickly. “But I hope to see you again. I’d like to see more of – well, everything.”

“You will.”

I slid into the open door of the cab, packages rustling beside me. “Goodnight, Yael. I had a really great time.”

“Me too!” she grinned. That smile stayed with her, even as she waved at me, diminishing with distance through the back window of the cab, into the night.

“Good morning, sir,” the waitresses spoke coolly at my shoulder the next morning. “See anything you like?”

I bit the inside of my cheek and suppressed a smile. “I believe so.” Closing the menu, I turned and looked at Yael evenly until I saw the faintest suggestion of a blush on her cheeks. “An omelette, please. And an orange juice.”

“Of course, sir.” Taking the menu, she took two steps away before turning back. “And sir, we very much appreciate your new attire.”

“You’re very welcome.” And she walked away, with just a trace of extra sway in her hips.

A few minutes later, Yael leaned over me to serve the meal, hip brushing against my shoulder. I wanted desperately to run my hand along the inside of her thigh.

My eyes were drawn to her whenever she moved in my line of sight in the restaurant: bending forward to serve a customer, her bottom raised slightly in the black skirt, taut stockinged calves drawn into relief; the profile of her face when she smiled; the trim tuck of the white blouse around her waist. By the end of the meal I was dry-mouthed, despite the emptied glass of orange juice on my table.

Yael slid the bill onto my table. “It was a pleasure serving you today, sir.” Her voice was low and sensual in my ear, unmistakably sexual. “I do hope we see you again.”

At the bottom of the bill, a phone number written neatly in purple ink, and a message:

Call me! Y.

After breakfast a GettCab took me from the hotel to the Old North district of Tel Aviv, opposite the marina, where I could pay for a phone and laptop and buy a SIM card at a mini-mart.

Back in the hotel, I unwrapped the laptop. Set the glossy black rectangle of the phone to one side. And placed Angie’s notebook on the desk.

My fingers traced the edges of the worn, black and white speckled cover, easing the book open to a random page. The close-written pages were streaked with highlights, flagged with index stickers, framed in marginalia. I knew every line.

I took a deep breath and spoke quietly. “Alright, Angie. Let’s get to work.”

A phone call to Dr. Weisz provided two dozen names in Tel Aviv: government bureau heads, diplomats, and academics in five different institutions. Introductions from the professor had led to open appointments with half of them. Over the next hour I tied down times and locations, scheduling a series of meetings that I could hit before dusk on Friday.

Entering Ramallah or Gaza would be risky until I had papers that could convince guards on both sides; I decided to set aside my work there, concentrating on building my resources in Tel Aviv.

Before her death, Angie had set out an extensive set of protocols designed to further research my gift, including longitudinal studies set out over years. Following her protocols had shown that a voice command would stay in effect for as long as required, and that most people would remain suggestible to subsequent commands for several days without requiring direct contact. I set Dr. Weisz to updating his binational plan to reflect the current situation on the ground, and made an appointment to revisit him in his office.

It took a few extra hours to set up the laptop and secure a reasonable internet connection, tunnelled and encrypted through the hotel’s WiFi. By the time I had finished, it was well past 2pm; I found Yael’s number, and touched it into the surface of the phone.

“Shalom,” Yael answered.

“Hi. I wondered if you might be free.”

“Joshua!” Her voice was delighted. “I’m just finishing up. Meet me at the back of the hotel? A half hour or so.”

“Sure.”

Thirty minutes later I was leaning against a concrete wall on the eastern side of the hotel, taking refuge in its cool shadow. I told myself that there was little else to do: the next part of Angie’s plan couldn’t take place until tomorrow. I felt a nagging sense that there was something I should have been working on, regardless.

I heard the low purr of a moped. Yael zipped around the corner wearing a bright sundress, grinning when she saw me.

“Hi.”

“Hi!” She cast her eyes left, right – looking for security cameras, I realised – and leaned in for a quick, exciting kiss. “I haven’t eaten all day. And you weren’t down for lunch. Want to go get something?”

“Sure.” I picked up the spare helmet from the back of her bike and slid in behind her, arms around the slimness of her waist. “Anywhere you want.”

“K! Hang on!”

Yael was a fearless driver, zipping in and out of traffic as she worked the little moped south through the city, back towards where I had been earlier that morning. Taking a bridge at speed, she pulled hard left, then right, bringing us up in front of a busy, nameless roadside food stall at a four-way intersection. “Best sabich in the city,” she declared. “We might have to wait a bit.”

We stood in a loose, meandering line watching pita being rolled around fresh roasted vegetables, stomachs growling. By the time we made it to the front, Yael was eager. “Two,” she declared. “Hakol bifnim.”

The pitas were stuffed with everything on the menu, hot and fresh. Yael made me hold them burning against my stomach as she raced the moped west to the seashore.

“I have to tell you,” she said, biting into her pita with relish, one leg up on the sea wall. “Serving breakfast in the restaurant today was torture.“

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought it was kind of fun.” I grinned as she kicked my calf affectionately.

“There’s something else. I Googled you between breakfast and lunch. There isn’t much. A photo of you at a school debate club. You were a cute kid, by the way.” She smiled. “But as far as I can tell, your family isn’t rich.”

“They’re not.”

“And you don’t act like a tourist.”

“I’m not. Not completely.”

“Then how – “ she gestured in the general direction of the hotel, and threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Yael.” I reached across, gathering both her hands around her wrapped meal. “I am travelling. But there is more. And if I told you everything I was doing here, it would sound insane. I don’t want to ... I don’t want to lie to you. So ... I’m asking you to trust me. I’m not doing anything illegal.”

“You’ll tell me eventually?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“Okay.”

We left the bike behind and walked down the ancient walkway to Old Jaffa. I told her a little about growing up in Thorncliff; she told me of her family: father a paratrooper in the IDF, mother who had discovered she was Jewish from her Polish parents, who had converted to Catholicism before she was born. We compared lives as military brats – similar the world over – and as the experience of an only child of a single mother versus growing up in a family of three brothers and two sisters, her parents still together.

Our hands brushed against each as we walked; not yet intertwining, but achingly close.

“I haven’t had the chance to tell Liora about you,” she said. “So I can’t invite you home. But she should be in tonight.”

“It’s okay. I hope I get the chance to meet her.”

“I’m not so sure. I want to keep you to myself,” she grinned.

“Oh?”

“Like I said: we’re not exclusive.”

“Mmm,” I replied non-committaly, and she nudged me in the ribs. “I’ll get to see you tomorrow, tho?”

“Yes! I’d like that.” She paused. “You’re strange, you know.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to put my finger on. You’re confident, like you could make anything happen. But you’re also quiet, almost shy. I’m sure I’ve talked a lot more than you.”

“Maybe you just have more to say.”

She looked at me sideways. “No, I don’t think that’s it.” She shrugged. “But I like it. You ask interesting questions.”

Flat on my back in the hotel gym, I raised and lowered the 30 pound medicine ball on my stomach with slow, controlled breaths.

Angelina’s plan had set forth a regimen of diaphragm exercises to improve my voice. In the years since, I had added running and weightlifting to further increase my endurance and power. I’d come to appreciate the workouts as a way to get me out of the house after hours of study; now, the exercises had become an ingrained habit, repeated every morning.