The Day Before Midnight

citizen. He’d been in their Airborne troops or something, which I heard was a big thing over there. He knew people in the embassy. I just wanted to — to hurt Peter.”

“Was he interested?”

“No. Not at first. He thought it was foolish. Israel doesn’t have big missiles, Israel doesn’t care about big missiles, that’s what he said. But I said the information was valuable. Israel could use it somehow, they were clever. Jews are always clever.”

“And so he relented?”

“Finally. You see, for me it gave me a chance to do something. And it wasn’t like giving it to the Communists. It was to people on our side. To other Jews.”

“Yes.”

“And he went to them, and they said yes, they’d look at it, and finally he said this man wanted to meet me and talk to me, but it wouldn’t do to be seen at the embassy, could I go up to New York and meet him at the consulate. The Israeli consulate.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, and so I did. I met an Israeli intelligence officer at the Israeli consulate and it was very nice. He was a brilliant, commanding man, very considerate, very charming. He said he didn’t want me to get into trouble, did I know what I was doing, was I sure, blah blah blah. He pointed out that Jonathan Pollard had been arrested and that our government was making ugly noise about prosecuting him to the max, and that if I got caught, maybe there wasn’t much they’d be able to do about it.”

“And—”

“And I didn’t care. I was sure. And so I started doing it. It was easy.” She felt so smug when she said it. She’d had a great deal of curiosity about this moment. Would she turn her confession into what Peter used to call one of her “productions”? Well, yes, she had.

She felt the eyes of the Three Dumb Men upon her.

“After all,” she said, “it was only the Israelis. I mean, they are our friends, the last time I looked at the Washington Post.”

“Mrs. Thiokol — do you mind if I call you that?”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Mrs. Thiokol, could you tell me a little about Ari Gottlieb? I mean, I don’t suppose you have any pictures.”

“Yes, I have three of his pictures. Abstract impressionism. He was not very good, that’s the fun — oh, you mean, his photograph. No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Could you tell us about him?”

“He was just everything I wanted. Except he had one flaw.”

“What was that.”

“It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help it.”

“What was it?”

“He wasn’t Peter Thiokol.”

She continued. “If anything, he was too perfect. Ari was beautiful and loving and never moody and very sexy. And dull.”

“He left you?”

“After an odd weekend in an inn in Virginia a while ago. Very strange.”

“How strange?”

“I can’t say. I slept through it all. I passed out after too much champagne. He was very offended. He left the next day. He had to go back to Israel. To his wife.”

“When was this?”

“Two weeks or so. I don’t really remember. Who remembers dates?”

“And so you’re alone.”

“I was alone even when I was married.”

“Tell me about this Israeli intelligence officer.”

“Oh, you know. Very clever man, very warm. Charming. Mysterious. I could tell he was a legend, even there in the consulate. They all looked at him. He was a special man. I remember after it was over, we went out on Seventy-third Street and he helped me get a taxi. You felt safe with him. And he—”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Thiokol?” It was, she saw, the youngest of the Three Dumb Men. He was slightly more tentative than the others and he could see his interruption irritated her.

“Yes?”

“You said Seventy-third Street.”

“Yes.”

“I used to be in our New York bureau. You mean Eighty-fourth Street.”

She was confused to sense no softness in his position.

“All right, I got the address mixed up. Who remembers addresses? And what dif — No, I’m sorry, it was Seventy-third Street! I’m not going to let you bully me. It was between Madison and Park. A lovely old brownstone. The Star of David on the flag, all the pictures of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, all the bustle, all the workers, all the—”

But she could feel him staring at her.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I know the building very well. It’s a brownstone all right, but it’s at Eighty-fourth, between Madison and Fifth, near the museum. I worked there, I used to go into that building regularly. We had a cooperating deal with Mossad for security.”

“I–I mean—”

And then she could think of nothing to say.

“Are you sure it was Seventy-third Street?”

She nodded dumbly.

“You see,” he said, “it would be pretty easy to do. Rent the house. For one morning you hang out the flag. You hang some pictures. Some people rush around, looking busy. An hour after you’ve gone, they’ve cleared out. That’s all.”

She felt a hole open: it was dark and huge. She was falling. No one was there to catch her.

Peter! she thought. God, Peter!

And then she said, “They fooled me. They just fooled me”.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid they did,” said one of the Three Dumb Men.

She began, very softly, to weep.

“Oh, Peter,” she wept, “oh, Jesus, what have I done?”

1700

Uckley sat in the front of the state police car by himself. He felt cold. Somebody had gotten him a blanket, which he pulled around himself. He sat in a festival of pulsing light. It seemed to be the world convention of police cars, and in the dusk, their red and blue lights bounced off the houses and the trees back at him. He had a headache and his guts hurt from the bullet impacts on the vest, but at least he was done vomiting.

Everybody was staying away from him, at least for now, and he was grateful for that small mercy. He stared ahead, seeing nothing. He was exhausted, flattened out. He preferred the numbness, however, because he knew that if he thought about it too much, he’d want to die, just to make it all go away.

The kids were with a state policewoman, but no one really was sure what to do with them, what with the father missing. He thought he’d heard something about them going to their grandmother’s in Hagerstown. He couldn’t look at them, the two little girls, little perfect angels, untouched by corruption or evil. He’d caught just a glimpse: they looked like little petals, perfect and rosy.