The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

John Weisman There Are Monsterim from Unusual Suspects

Jerusalem, July 1977

Liz’s fifth birthday was on Saturday, and so Terry, the perfect father, took her to Nahariya on Wednesday for a long weekend at the beach. Sainted mother Maggie let them go without her.

They’d first thought of celebrating the kid’s premier half-decade in Haifa, in a big room at the Dan Carmel where, from the terrace, they could look down on the bustling port and eat dinner at the perpetually crowded Romanian restaurant on the edge of the farmer’s market. But while Terry had already telexed his “Summer Travel in the Holy Land” piece to the New York Times Tuesday, Maggie was still tied up polishing a profile of Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan that was due at Woman’s Day. She wouldn’t shake free until Friday night.

Besides, they decided, the Dan was expensive and he’d have to pay for a double room all five nights. Besides, they rationalized, Liz wasn’t a big fan of Haifa anyway, preferring the construction of sand castles, wallowing in the surf, and the scarfing of fast food to romantic harbor views and Romanian steaks slathered with — in Liz’s words — “Eecch, garlic.”

So, after a brief parental discussion about four-year-olds’ eating habits, family finances, and the fact that he’d be carless in Haifa until Maggie arrived, they chose to go farther north and stay at a modest pension they knew in Nahariya, chockablock to a dozen falafel and shashlik stands, fifty yards from the water and, as it happened, one-fifth the price of the Dan.

Terry packed a duffel for himself and Liz, carefully stowed Liz’s teddy bear, Shmulik, right on top of the bags, and then they all piled into the beat-up Renault 4 and Maggie dropped them at the taxi stand on Luntz Street, where they taught one of the Israeli communal jitney t abs known as a sherut to Haifa. The big gray Mercedes diesel car was just about to pull out. Maggie gave them quick pecks on the cheek and shooed them on their way. They shared the two-hour ride with a Hasid who smoked incessantly, a middle-aged yenta who fell asleep just after the turnoff to Abu Gosh and snored contentedly for the rest of the trip, and two Israeli Army girls on leave.

Liz, too, slept most of the way to Haifa, waking only briefly when the sherut stopped at the Herzliyah interchange to take on a passenger, then dropping back into full snooze, her knees curled fetally, head on Terry’s lap.

He, the conscientious parent, developed lock-joint in his knees by the time they pulled into Haifa, his long legs having been frozen uncomfortably in one position for forty-four kilometers.

In Haifa they switched to an aged Egged bus that chugged and wheezed, Lizzie insisted, like the Little Engine That Could, gears grating and the red-faced driver, a cigarette clenched between tight lips, cursing the autos that had the audacity to pass on the narrow, two-lane highway north of Akko. Terry watched Liz as she kneeled, nose pressed to filthy window glass, remarking on every olive grove, banana tree, hitching soldier, donkey, and tractor in the fields as the bus lurched inexorably northward.

Four-year-olds, the father thought, were incredible. He never stopped marveling at the creature he and Maggie had created: he took pleasure in watching Liz sleep; doted on her when she was awake; snapped endless pictures of her antics, her poses, her wide-eyed grins.

He sometimes wondered whether this perpetual enchantment with his daughter was the result of his becoming a father so late in life, or whether it was based on his own middle-aged fears of mortality and the deep-rooted, primordial need to procreate in order to see one’s self reflected in another human being. Those were two possible answers, of course. But more basically, he simply loved his daughter with a love so total, absolute, and all-consuming that, from time to time, the enormity of that love frightened the hell out of him.

He reached over and caressed Liz’s cheek tenderly with the back of his hand. She’d gotten herself all dolled up for the trip north, declining Maggie’s practical suggestions of jeans or shorts with a maverick shake of golden hair and insisting instead on wearing a bright pink and white plaid “Mommy dress,” as she called it, accompanied by a quartet of plastic sparkle bangle bracelets, a necklace of fluorescent green beads, and a rhinestone barrette carefully placed askew atop her head.

“Etonnant!” Maggie’d exclaimed as she coolly perused the defiant combination of colors, then giggled and swept the child into her arms to rearrange the barrette. “You are your mother’s daughter.”

Even after her sherut nap. Terry realized, the kid was tired by the time they reached Nahariya in midafternoon, and so instead of going down to the beach immediately they shared a pair of greasy falafels spiked with piquant tomato sauce and a couple of grapefruit sodas swigged from the bottle at a kiosk near the bus stop. Then Terry swung the duffel bag over his left shoulder, swept up Liz with his free arm, lugged the two bundles three blocks, and checked into a first-floor room at the Pension Har Zion that had a three-by-six-foot balcony overlooking an alley and lots of other three-by-six-foot balconies, and the two of them lay down for an hour on squeaky camp cots.

They woke at six-thirty, sweaty and grungy. Terry turned on the shower (it wasn’t much of a shower but it was wet) and put Liz into it first, then dried her off and while she dressed herself he rinsed off the travel grime, shampooing his red hair twice and lathering quickly with the hard hotel soap as the water temperature dropped precariously fast. Wrapped in a towel he stepped back in the room to find his daughter singing to Shmulik, whom she held cradled in small arms.

He started to speak but she put a finger to her lips.

“Quiet. Daddy. Shmulik’s tired from the long trip and he’s afraid because it’s a different bed and I’m singing him to sleep.” So he followed orders and watched silent as Liz, who’d put her T-shirt on inside out, rocked the steady teddy, three days younger than she was, and sang an incredible melange of English and Hebrew nonsense syllables as the creature stared up at her lovingly with button eyes.

She was a bright child. Precocious, Terry thought proudly; always the coquette. Her habit (just like her mother) was to stand, legs slightly apart, feet planted firmly, hands on her hips, and, well, command. She’d spoken words at nine months, sentences at sixteen, and after having lived in Israel more than half her life she could make do in Hebrew almost as well as either of her parents, learning the language by osmosis from Orli, the Yemenite maid who came daily to clean and watch her while Terry and Maggie pursued their writing chores. Bright, hell, she was a pistol. Take Shmulik the bear. Originally his name had been Bar-Bar, which was short for bear-bear. But seven or eight months after they’d arrived in Israel Liz announced that the teddy had been rechristened.

“Shmulik,” she said, oozing the syllables. “Shmu-u-u-ulik.” And Shmulik he’d been ever since.

They’d come to Israel three years before, moving from Rome in the fall of 1974. The nomadic, vaguely newlywed American Family Robinson on a Great New Adventure. Maggie was the one with the job: an associate producer for a U.S. television network whose news panjandrums decided to expand Middle East coverage by opening a minibureau in Jerusalem.

Terry, who made his living freelance writing and occasionally editing English-language texts, had lived overseas for two decades, a confirmed bachelor well into his late thirties, until he’d met the beautiful, auburn-haired Maggie Ross on a blind date in Rome, wooed her for sixteen months with flowers, white Italian truffles, and weekends in Tuscany, and finally — finally — convinced her, twelve years his junior and ambitious as hell, that marriage to a struggling journalist entering early middle age was the fate to which she’d been doomed.

Eleven months after they set up housekeeping in a small but comfortable house with a huge garden in Jerusalem’s German Colony, Maggie’s network got a new vice president for news and a new set of budget priorities, which did not include a Jerusalem minibureau. So, twenty-six weeks’ severance pay in their pockets, the network American Express card cut in two and express-mailed to New York, they were suddenly on their own in the Promised Land, evicted from the expense-account Eden of network news. They thought about going back to Rome, but they’d rented out the five-room flat Terry owned in Parioli — a four-year lease to an American diplomatic couple. Besides, they rationalized, Rome was expensive, while the house in Jerusalem cost a mere $350 a month and Israel’s living costs were lower than anywhere in Western Europe except Portugal. The country was beautiful, the people were friendly. Moving would be a hassle. They decided to stay on, as long as they could make ends meet.

Maggie, a natural scrambler, got work as a freelance producer whenever Barbara Walters or Walter Cronkite or some other network luminary came to town and needed extra hands. She also pitched article ideas about many of the Israeli political contacts she’d made to every American magazine she could think of — and a few paid off. The Woman’s Day profile of Dayan was her first big-time assignment and she fretted over each comma and semicolon.

If the magazine bought and published it, it would be a breakthrough — not to mention the $3,500 fee, enough to keep them going for four months if they were cautious about how they spent it.

There was other money, of course. The net income from Terry’s apartment was a thousand a month. His freelance articles brought in four to six thousand a year. A one-day-a-week editing stint at the Jerusalem Post’s International Edition was good for another fifteen hundred per annum. And if things got really rough there was the account in Switzerland, a numbered account containing just under five hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars in Swiss francs, Terry Robinson’s accumulated pay as an NOC — Non-Official-Cover — contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, for which he’d worked on and off since graduating from Brown University twenty-three years before.

He wasn’t one of those gun-toting cowboys of suspense fiction. Not his style, although he’d qualified with a handgun during a training session back in the States a decade earlier. Nor was he an expert on ciphers and satellite transmissions.

Terence Robinson was an information gatherer, an evaluator, a shrewd judge of others. He was adept at recruiting and setting up networks of agents, running them, and protecting his people. His cover was perfect: as a freelance journalist, a writer of ephemeral articles on travel (and, very occasionally, Euro-politics), he got to see a lot of things and meet a lot of people.

Much of the information he gleaned he passed on to Langley through a series of case officers. In Italy he spent his time writing about tourism, even publishing a paperback on Tuscany. He wrote occasionally about the labor movement for the Wall Street Journal and a somewhat overdramatic, he thought at the time, piece on the rise of domestic Italian terror for Playboy. But for the most part, Terry Robinson stayed clear of controversial themes. They were dangerous because they pegged you one way or another, and his entire existence depended on his not being pegged as anything but a nondescript freelancer, a generic American expatriate.

Maggie knew what he did of course.

Johnny T, Terry’s case officer when he’d gotten married, had encouraged him to tell Maggie the truth.

“There are secrets and there are secrets,” Johnny had said, long fingers drumming idly on a Formica table at a nondescript trattoria just off the crowded Piazza Farnese. “If Maggie doesn’t know, it could be worse for you in the long run.” Besides. Johnny’d explained, the Agency was leery of agents who couldn’t share one of the most basic facets of their existence with their wives.

So, shortly after their marriage he’d taken Maggie to San Gimignano for the weekend on the pretext of researching a piece on some of the small wineries in the area. They stayed at a simple hotel in Pancole, a few kilometers outside the town, and over wine, crusty peasant bruschetta, salad made of wild greens, and thick grilled veal chops, he quietly explained to his bride just what he did for a living.

“You’re kidding,” she said, her hand clapped to her mouth. When he didn’t smile, she dropped her hand and said, genuinely shocked, “You’re not.”

And then, perceptive reporter that she was, she cut to the heart of the matter: “Why, Terry?”

He played with his wineglass. “Because there are bad guy’s out here, and the only way to keep them from winning is to do everything you can to be one of the good guys.”

She frowned. “Everything you can?”

“All I can — the best I can.”

She shook her head. “But history—”

“Nobody really understands history. Not really. Not all the way.”

She nodded in agreement. “Okay — let’s leave history out of it. What makes me so afraid right now, is the ‘everything you can’ thing. If you do everything you can stop the world’s bad guys, don’t you end up committing the same kind of crimes you most want to prevent?”

“Sometimes. If you let yourself,” Terry said evenly. He looked at her, his face dead serious. “But I’ll never let myself.”

Her eyes told him she wasn’t sure about that.

“Believe me, Maggie,” he said, “I could never become the same thing I’m fighting against.” He took a sip of wine and returned her stare. “Because if you do that, you stop being political — you simply become a criminal. I know — I’ve seen it happen. And I don’t like it.”

He saw she had tears in her eyes. “What’s the problem?”

“I love you so much,” she said.

And so they agreed to a truce. He was never totally explicit with her about the details of his covert existence. There were clandestine meetings that he went to, and trips he took suddenly. But the specifics were never discussed between them. She had insisted on that, and he honored her request. Unlike Terry, who used his writing as a cover and considered himself a dilettante, Maggie’s appointed role in life was professional journalist, and sometimes she felt torn between the ideals she had learned as a student at Northwestern University’s Medill Graduate School of Journalism and the hard-edged economic, political, and social realities with which she now came in contact on a daily basis.

She had been twenty-six when she’d met Terry; less than three years out of grad school, the Midwest patina of her childhood in Lakewood, Ohio, barely scrubbed away. She had known from the age of twelve she would be a journalist, and she had worked hard to achieve that goal, waitressing her way through Ohio State University, winning a scholarship to Medill, and, following her graduation, moving to New York and a greenhorn’s slot on the assignment desk of NBC News. She was vibrant and energetic and filled with the righteous indignation common to young practitioners of the journalist’s craft. Her job, she argued (often passionately), was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

It took her some months to reconcile what she did with what Terry did. She was a child of the sixties blessed (or cursed) with the antagonism toward government common to most of her generation. And yet she respected, albeit somewhat grudgingly, what Terry did. He supported the system and was willing to put himself on the line for his beliefs. And so, despite Maggie’s negative feelings about such things as the war in Vietnam, Nixon’s presidency, and the way Henry Kissinger ran U.S. foreign policy, she understood Terry’s commitment (perhaps it was her conservative Lake-wood upbringing) to his agency and to their Nation.

Not that she didn’t experience emotional conflicts. She approved of what her husband did. But she also realized the disasters that could befall them if her friends and colleagues from Rome’s American journalistic community ever found out about Terry’s covert activities. Like it or not, Maggie was drawn inside the double-edged existence shared by all spies’ families: the cover stories and outright lies that have to be told in order to survive. Lying to her friends and colleagues did not sit easily with her. And yet she did what she had to do, because her husband’s safety depended on her constancy and consistency.

She’d experienced more of those conflicts in Italy than she did in Israel. Italy in the mid-seventies was fertile turf for Terry’s clandestine operations. The Red Brigades were active. The Libyans, rich with petrodollars and vehemently anti-American, bought their way into foundering Italian corporations. The Communist Party controlled newspapers, labor unions, and thousands of local politicians. In Italy there was a lot for Terry to do — and he worked continually on Agency business while Maggie produced infrequent two-minute news stories about the Pope, earthquakes, and the anarchy of Neapolitan society, all the time fretting quietly about her husband’s safety.

In Israel things were different. Liz made the biggest change in their lives, of course. The kid had been unplanned, the result of a trip to Venice. Terry had asked her to come along with him at the last minute, she’d forgotten to pack her diaphragm, and the rest was history. Maggie had always sworn to herself she wouldn’t have a child until she had won her first Emmy. The day Liz was born she’d realized what a real award she’d been given. Not that she was any less ambitious, it was simply that her ambitions now had two objectives: a terrific daughter and great news stories. After her layoff, she found herself less and less inclined toward the eighteen-hour days she’d willingly put in as a network producer, preferring to spend time with Liz and putter in the garden between writing assignments.

Their move from Italy, she noticed, had affected Terry as well. Israel was an ally, a friendly oasis in a hostile environment. If Terry were operating in Jerusalem, he showed no sign of it, working on freelance journalism and his part-time job at the Post’s grimy Romema headquarters and most every day coming home for lunch, a nap, and a couple of hours’ playtime with Liz. He’d told her that Israel would be a virtual vacation for him, and that seemed to be the case.

“Friends don’t spy on each other,” he’d insisted. “I’m an expert on Communist labor unions, not the Histadrut.”

And the PLO?

“Geez, Mag, the Israelis have those guys cold. I couldn’t find out one thousandth of what the Shin Bet’s got on Arab terrorists even if I were fluent in Arabic and had Yasir Arafat his bloody self on my payroll.”

Still, he’d developed professional contacts — Maggie was sure of it — among the left-wing members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. And he went out of his way to cultivate a few of the more moderate West Bank Palestinian Arabs.

Israel was not Italy. There were no late-night assignations, no dead drops or one-time cipher books. There were no calls to Maggie from pay phones that went, “I gotta see a man about a horse, darlin’,” his way of letting her know he might not be home for a few hours or a few days. There was none of the perpetual, gnawing, unspoken dread Terry Robinson had come to know in his gut, the brickbat pain that hit him like an ulcer when he worked the streets alone and unprotected. He’d felt those twinges for twenty years, in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, and London.

No, Israel was different. Strange for him, a Christian in a Jewish homeland, that he felt so comfortable in this rough country of olives and orange groves and scrub-brush wadis, this raw, unsophisticated place with its boy soldiers and bearded Hasids and breakneck drivers. He loved Israel’s vitality, took pleasure in its adolescent chauvinism, its matter-of-fact fatalism, its almost professional irreverence. He’d come to feel safe walking Israel’s crowded streets and visiting its historic sites.

He watched as Liz laid the bear on her cot, fussing, tucking it under the covers tightly, its nappy head right in the middle of the pillow.

She turned to him, bright-eyed, her index finger touching pursed lips, the bracelets up around her elbow. “Okay, Daddy, we can go. But we have to leave the light on because Shmulik is scared by the monsterim.”

“Monsterim?” He was amazed. She’d fixed a Hebrew plural suffix onto an English word.

Hands on her hips, she glared up at him, her face serious, and stage-whispered, “You know — monsters.”

He nodded sagely. “Any special kind of monsters?”

“Big ones. With teeth—” She spread her hands two feet apart.

“I’ve seen those big monsters before,” he said. “I know all about them. But Shmulik doesn’t have to worry.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” He scanned the room quickly. It was Spartan: paneled walls, a single bare-bulb lamp with clip-on shade for light, an armoire where they’d hung their clothes, and, hidden by the panels’ vertical joints, a spring-closed storage closet where the extra bedding and a third cot were kept. Terry went to the section of panel where the faint outline of the storage closet could just be seen and pressed the hidden door. It sprung open. He gestured. “See? All Shmulik has to do is run in there and close the door and he’ll be safe.”

Liz scampered over and looked inside, wrinkling her face disapprovingly. “Eecch, Daddy, it’s smelly. I’d rather leave the lights on.”

He laughed. “Okay, okay. Shmulik gets the lights.”

They walked hand in hand through the crowded streets, marveling at the electric lanterns that were strung above their heads. On the beachfront Terry headed toward a restaurant he remembered from their last trip, and after obtaining Liz’s approval they commandeered a table facing the water, and the attention of an overworked waiter. Terry ordered a Gold Star beer; Liz decided on Coke. Solemnly, they poured the drinks into streaked glasses and touched rims.

“Cheers, my birthday girl.”

“Daddy — it’s not till Saturday.”

“Well, it’s soon enough to say cheers.”

She shook her head. “No it isn’t. You can only say ‘Cheers, my birthday girl’ when it’s my birthday.”

She was so literal. Just like her father, he thought. “Okay,” he improvised, “cheers, my non-birthday girl.”

“You’re silly. Daddy.”

“Of course I’m silly. I’m a daddy. You know what you are?”

She shook her head.

“You,” he paused, waiting for the desired effect, “are an imp.”

Reaction achieved. “Am not. There’s no such real word like imp.”

“Oh yes there is. I can show it to you in the dictionary when we get home. Or we can call your mother and ask her to look it up.”

Inquisitive: “What does imp mean?”

“It means Liz Robinson.”

Defiant: “No it doesn’t.”

“It means Liz-who-wears-dresses-on-the-bus-and-tucks-in-her-teddy-Robinson.”

Petulant: “No it doesn’t.”

“It means Liz-who-likes-Coca-Cola-because-it-makes-her-nose-wrinkle-Robinson.”

“It means what you’re doing, Daddy. Being mischiev... mischievoonieous.”

Where the hell did she come up with the damn words? He laughed. He agreed. “When I was your age I was an imp.”

Triumphant: “You are an imp, too, Daddy.” She took her glass in two hands and slurped contentedly on Coke. “We are impim!”

They dined royally, so far as Liz was concerned, on kebab sandwiches and French fries drowned in ketchup. Terry had two more Gold Stars, Liz another Coke.

After he paid the bill they walked down the beach and Liz took off her sandals and scampered down to the water. Terry rolled his trouser legs, shed his Top-Siders, and followed. Then they went for ice cream, glida in Hebrew; coconut ice cream in a sugar cone that had, to Terry’s dismay, a bad leak. He wiped at Liz’s chin and the top of her T-shirt with an inefficient, wax-coated napkin then gave up and swabbed wholeheartedly with his pocket handkerchief.

By nine-thirty Liz was feeling tired again so they abandoned the streets for their hotel room. He peeled Liz out of her clothes, sent her to the bathroom, and waited as she brushed her teeth, then dumped her playfully into her bed, Shmulik resting comfortably in the crook of her arm.

“Daddy?”

He kissed her forehead. “What, Liz?”

“Would you stay here with me?”

“Sure, honey. Why?”

“This bed is lumpy and I’m not sure I can get right to sleep but I’m tired and I want to sleep and I—”

He cut her off. “Not to worry, imp. Daddy’s here.” He slipped onto the narrow bed and cradled his daughter. He kissed her cheeks and her forehead and held the child to him. “Not to worry. Daddy’s here.”

He was still on Liz’s bed, lying fully clothed and dreaming when the shots woke him. He didn’t know what time it was and his head was foggy with sleep but the shots were unmistakable: automatic weapons fire coming from close by.

Instinctively he rolled out of the bed. Liz, too, was awake and she started, startled, to go with him but he pushed her head gently back onto the pillow and looked her straight in the face. “Stay here, baby, stay here.”

He moved quickly to the door of the balcony, cracked it open and peered outside, wincing as the firing grew closer, bullets whining ricochets off nearby stone. There were shouts, cries, and then an explosion from somewhere down below. He looked back at the bed where Liz lay frightened. He called to her: “Lizzie, hit the deck. Get down on the floor and stay there.”

“Daddy—”

“Liz — do exactly what I say. Now!”

He couldn’t tell where the firing was coming from, or from whom, or —

More shots. Closer. Now from inside the hotel. Down the stairs. Down the hall. Were they coming — they — terrorists? Soldiers? He crawled toward the door and pressed his ear against it. Shouting.

But not Hebrew shouting. Arabic shouting.

Terrorists. Oh, goddamn to hell terrorists. Liz. Terrorists. His heart raced. They were trapped. A twenty-foot drop to hard pavement outside and maybe the goddamn terrorists were waiting for them there, too. He tried to ease his racing heart. Okay. Think. You are a goddamn professional. You are supposed to know what to do.

He went on automatic pilot. Light? No light. Dark room. Dark equals safety. He rolled to the desk and reached up (“Oh, damn, Lizzie,” as he heard the adjacent door splinter) and smashed the bulb.

Now — shelter. His mind worked in milliseconds debating the possibilities. Under the bed. No protection. Bathroom. No protection. Closet.

Closet: dark room; closet hidden. Grab Liz. Stay quiet. Wail. Roll to the left. Take Liz.

Her eyes were frightened, panicked saucers. She began to cry out and he realized that she was reflecting his own state. He forced himself to calm down. Whispered shushing noises in her ear as he held her and crawled to the paneled wall, found the hidden door, pulled the two of them inside and then, fingers searching desperately for an exposed piece of wood, clicked the door closed. Exhausted, he lay panting in the small black space, his body wrapped around the child.

He found her ear and kissed it. “Lizzie — there are bad men outside. Very bad. We have to lie here very, very still until we hear them go away.”

The child began to sob uncontrollably. He covered her mouth and whispered in her ear again. “Can’t do that, Lizzie. Can’t cry or talk or anything because if they find us they’ll hurt us.” His mind raced. All his training; all his experience — nothing to show for it. Lying in a dark place waiting to be killed. Waiting for the child to be killed. Take me — leave Liz. Hostages. Gunshot wounds. Grenades. Knives in Liz’s throat. Liz’s head severed.

Liz cried. He held her mouth tighter. “No, no, no, baby. No crying. Can’t cry.”

“Shmulik,” she gargled. “Shmulik—” and she clawed at the wood door, trying to push it open in the suffocating blackness.

Terry held her down, wrestling his body atop hers, his eyes wide in the stifling, airless hidey-hole.

“No-no-no-no,” he wheezed, his hands tightening on the child’s mouth and nose. Hurting her, he knew, but he had to, to protect her. “Shmulik’s okay, Liz. He’s okay right where he is. He’s a big bear. He can take care of himself.”

The outside door splintered. Terry could hear the wood give way and he cringed as automatic weapons raked the place. Loud voices. Arabic. Screams. Liz echoed them, or tried to — Terry held her down as she struggled. More shots. More screams. From... somewhere, a drum beat loudly, incessantly, against his ear. He realized it was the pulse in his wrist. He tried to still it. Took the knuckle of his index finger and put it in his mouth. Bit down hard. The pain would kill the noise. Under him, Liz calmed down, her sobbing stopped. Now the loudest noise in the black was his own heartbeat.

Other voices. Gunshots. Distant voices. How long had they lain there? Minutes? Hours? His eyes closed in the darkness. Terry waited, waited, waited.

Other voices closer now. Hebrew or Arabic? He bit on his finger until tears came to his eyes. Quiet, Lizzie, or they’ll hear us. The monsterim. Big teeth. Sharp knives.

Lights outside their hiding place. Oh, God, we’re found out... be killed. Voices. Shots. Hebrew. English. English English English: “Mr. Robinson — Mr. Robinson, this is the Army.”

Pounding. Sudden brilliant light. His eyes couldn’t take it. Wincing, he saw a lethal silhouette, a helmeted face, a hand holding an Uzi submachine gun.

Arms dragged him and Liz into the room.

Hands lifted him. Quick frisk then onto the bed. God it was cold. A body was sprawled on the floor, red-and-white keffiyeh splotched with blood covering the head. Nearby, two grenades and an AK-47 rifle with long, curved ammo clips taped back to back. The corpse was reaching for the weapons with a stone-dead hand.

He tried to find his daughter. “Liz? Liz? You okay, kiddo? We made it, Lizzie. The Army’s here. The bad men are all gone (They are gone, aren’t they? You killed the sons of bitches, didn’t you?) Don’t worry, Liz, the bad men all gone.”

Where the hell’s the bear? Where’s Shmulik? Lizzie wants Shmulik. She’d cried for Shmulik. Where’s the goddamn bear?

“Sit up Mr. Robinson,” said a voice. “Please sit up.”

He obeyed, his eyes still unaccustomed to the brightness of the room. “Liz — where’s Liz?”

The commando had her. The hooded commando in black SWAT clothing, dripping state-of-the-art ordnance, looking like a character out of a Ninja fantasy, had Liz in his arms and he was KISSING HER? KISSING HER ON THE LIPS? Terry launched himself across the room but strong arms held him back.

The commando’s eyes raised toward Terry but his mouth never left Liz’s lips. He lowered the child onto the floor, pushing on her chest, muttering a cadence in Hebrew, “Echad, shtyim, shilosh, arba, shesh...” then blowing in her mouth.

The commando’s eyes locked with his own. Dead gray eyes. Terry would recall much, much later. Dead gray eyes peering through holes in the black balaclava hood.

There was a lot of muted conversation carried on in Hebrew as he sat on the edge of the bed, the hands of soldiers, strong young men in khaki and black who blocked his view, resting on his shoulders while his own hands supported his head. He didn’t understand a word of it. But something was terribly wrong.

Finally, a captain knelt by his side. Terry stared at the man uncomprehending, noting — absurdly, he thought for an instant — the crow’s-feet around the officer’s eyes and the deep scar along the man’s neck and wondering where he’d gotten them. The Israeli put his arm around Terry’s shoulder and squeezed.

“She is gone, Mr. Robinson. I’m sorry.”

Sorry? Gone? Who’s gone? Gone where? Gone how?

Then, he saw. Then he realized what he’d done.

The commando was laying Liz on a stretcher, oxygen mask obscuring most of her small face, still pushing down on her chest and counting the goddamn Hebrew syllables, “Echad, shtyim, shilosh, arba,” and Liz, Liz, Liz’s eyes were closed and — “Ooh, God — NOOOO!”

He screamed and lurched toward the stretcher where they were tying down the corpse of his daughter his love his child oh, God, no. “Please — God, take me now. Take me, take me, take me. Not her. Not Liz. Oh, please. God — Maggie — God, my baby, my baby. Dear God, no!”

Things went black and white. The soldiers held him down, he fighting against them, nauseated by the sweaty jumble of arms and bodies smelling of fear and death. From somewhere a hand with a syringe appeared and it went into his upper arm right through the shirt and then the room started to spin crazily, bright lights blinking neon like Piccadilly in the rain and he felt himself disappearing into a crystal vortex and the last words he heard himself scream were, “Don’t you idiots understand? Take her teddy, take her teddy — there are monsterim.”