TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
February 1950
The next day, in a small room at 85 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, Peter checked his suitcase one last time, making sure his clothes had no Hebrew labels, that his toiletries were clean of all Hebrew lettering, that nothing he wore or carried could identify him as a citizen of Israel. All he kept was his watch, his father’s Swiss Longines, that he never took off: his security blanket. He checked that he had the right passport and that it matched his driving license, library card, identity card, and ration book, all in the name of Willimod Stinglwagner, Munich importer of medical products. It was such an unlikely German name that he felt it had to sound genuine. “Nennen Sie mir Willi,” he would say. “Call me Willi.”
That was for Germany. Here at the Office he was better known by his code name: Wolf.
Satisfied, Peter closed the case and lay on the bed, pulling on a cigarette, still tingling from Tamara. What a body, what a beauty, what a girl. He just knew Arie would be all over her, and there wasn’t a thing he could do. He must not go to see her, he didn’t even have an address to write to. Any slipup could be deadly.
He waited to be briefed by his handler. He only knew that he’d be working on his own, or almost on his own. Nothing new there. He had been a secret agent for years, with America’s OSS in Europe, then for Shai, the Jewish Underground in Palestine, and now for Israel.
At a tap on the door Peter sprung to his feet, ready to be taken to room seven for the briefing. Instead, in walked Reuven Shiloah himself, holding a large brown envelope. Peter stepped back, put out his hand, withdrew it. “Reuven,” he said. “Sir. I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting…”
“Relax, Peter, sit down,” Shiloah said. “I came myself because this won’t be the usual.”
“‘The usual.’ There’s such a thing?”
Shiloah didn’t smile. He rarely did, and certainly not now. The prime minister’s special adviser was a legendary master of the dark arts. He had founded the pre-state secret service, formulated many of Israel’s defense doctrines, and was the most trusted of David Ben-Gurion’s secret warriors. He gave nothing away. It was said that when a taxi driver asked where he was going Shiloah told him to mind his own business.
Shiloah sat to Peter’s left, and as he began to speak, Peter couldn’t take his eyes off the scar below his right cheekbone. He hadn’t seen Shiloah since the man had been hit in the face by shrapnel from an Arab car bomb in Jerusalem. The thin reddish welt that twitched as his jaw moved and his unwavering stare through round-rimmed spectacles made Shiloah appear almost fiendish.
Peter shifted uncomfortably, leaning back as the big man edged closer; the spymaster’s presence was overwhelming. Fortunately Shiloah rose and began to pace, but his first words made Peter’s heart miss a beat. “This could be a long operation, Peter.…”
Long? Tamara flashed before Peter, bare shoulders and swelling breasts, honey skin, sparkling eyes, and wet hair, their bodies a perfect fit.
“And a difficult one…”
Peter tried to focus.
“I’m not going to say more than I need, but you know about our problem with Yanai center? With our own people there?”
Peter nodded. Yanai was the code name for the Paris station. It was the talk of the bureau. Black market, cheating on expenses, agents living high on the hog, clumsy meetings in luxury hotel lobbies, in short, everything the austere socialists running the country despised, and to make it worse, serial incompetence and meager results.
“Yes, I get the picture; we all do,” Peter said. Out of loyalty to a friend in the Paris team, he added, “Isn’t it true, though, that they need to make money on the side to finance their activities because their budget is much too low? That’s what people are saying.”
If looks could kill, he was dead.
Shiloah sneered. “The short answer is No. The long answer is that I will deal with them all, be sure of that.” His tone changed, short and blunt. “But that is not the point. This is a very sensitive and dangerous time for Israel, and we must focus on what is most important.” He sat down and fixed Peter with his notorious stare.
“I want you to go to West Germany, and report back only to me. No contact with anyone else. Our European organization is compromised by those clowns in Paris and this is too sensitive a mission to take a risk. You must know that Ben-Gurion is convinced we’re on the brink of another war. Me, I’m not so sure. But we must be ready for anything. I have a special mission for you. Long-term.” He took a bundle of photographs from his envelope, set them out on the bed, and looked up at Peter. “I trust only you with this, nobody else.”
For whenever Reuven Shiloah had an especially sensitive mission, off the books, when he needed someone with loyalty, discretion, as well as cunning and special fighting skills, he called on Peter Nesher.
* * *
The young man had first caught Shiloah’s eye toward the end of World War Two, when Peter Berg was a twenty-two-year-old officer in the American OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and Shiloah was trying to win American support for the Zionist enterprise. He also had discreet feelers out for potential allies inside the American operation.
Peter fit the perfect profile: a Jew who had escaped Germany at the age of fourteen, lucky to be sent to safety in America. He spoke perfect English with a flat Midwest accent, as well as German. At the age of twenty he had fought his way through Europe with the 45th Division of the US Seventh Army, winning the Silver Star for gallantry: he had led an assault on a machine-gun nest but ran out of ammunition; he jumped the last two gunners and stabbed their throats with his bayonet. He was among the first units to liberate the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, where he had searched desperately among the survivors for his family, who came from nearby Munich. He searched in vain. Finally, because of his cunning, bravery, and fluent German, he had been tapped by the OSS to work on secret missions among the German population, and then farther afield.
Shiloah thought he had the perfect background, experience, and skills to spy for the Jews of Palestine. But at that time, in 1945, Peter had turned him down. He said he already had a job, and owed America, and wouldn’t cheat on them. Nothing would budge him, no threats, no entreaties, no bribes.
But in 1947, two years after war’s end, Peter, by now one of the founding agents at the CIA, had been shocked to learn that his younger brother had survived the concentration camps after all. He went to search for him in Palestine. And it was Shiloah who found, within hours of Peter’s appeal for help, that his brother, Aren Berg, was living in Tel Aviv under the Hebrew name of Arie ben Nesher. It made sense. The root of the German name “Aren” was the same as the Hebrew “Nesher”: Eagle. To celebrate, Peter took the same family name and became Peter Nesher.
Peter told Shiloah he would be forever in his debt, and a conversation had ensued that Peter would never forget, even if he sometimes came to regret it.
“Why forever? Pay me back right now.” Shiloah had said.
Surprised, Peter had answered, “If I can, of course.”
“Oh, you can. The question is, will you?” Shiloah launched into his recruiting speech, which rarely failed. “Do you want to serve your people? Because we need you now. Our battle in Palestine has barely begun, Jews are fighting for our very existence, as we have not fought in two thousand years. Could the Nazi massacres happen again? Of course they could, if the Arabs had half a chance. But this time we will not be led like lambs to the slaughter. We will fight back and defeat our enemies. We will build our Jewish state, and defend it for eternity. The question is, do you want to be part of the greatest Jewish enterprise since the Jews were forced into exile?” He followed up at the jugular.”Do you want to avenge your murdered parents? Your slaughtered sisters?”
They were walking in shirtsleeves along the busy Tel Aviv promenade on a glorious sunny day, which only emphasized their good fortune, the freedom they enjoyed in contrast to the horror of the camps, which had taken the lives of six million Jews.
“For every Jew you see around you here in Palestine,” Shiloah had said, “nine were murdered. Can you imagine such a thing?” He stopped and took Peter’s hands. “Spread out your fingers. Now close all but one.” Peter did, leaving the index finger of his right hand. “That last one standing is you, safe,” Shiloah went on. “But for how long? And don’t you owe a debt to the dead? Why, of all people, did you survive? For what?”
Men and women were laughing and splashing in the calm sea and sunning themselves on the sandy beach. Boys played paddleball, the rat-a-tat of solid rubber on wood like gunshots mingled with honking cars and calls of “Artik, artik,” from the dark-skinned men selling fruit ices. “Nine dead bodies for every one here,” Shiloah said, shaking his head. “Can you imagine? Never again.”
They paused, watching a boy chase a girl, kicking up sand, and the silence lengthened. “Well, do you?” Shiloah insisted. “Want to avenge your parents? By protecting our country?”
Instinctively, Peter rubbed his leather watch strap. “How can I say no?”
“Wrong answer.”
Peter turned to the older man, who had become something of a friend, and had to grin. “How’s this? Of course. Of course I do. Very much. This time the answer is yes.”
“That’s better,” Shiloah said, taking Peter’s hand. “Come with me.”
They had crossed the beach road and walked past the low homes and shops to Ben Yehuda Street, a tall, powerful middle-aged man with graying hair and spectacles, accompanied by a slim, tough man half his age. Two men with a purpose. Shiloah had guided Peter to the secret headquarters of the spy agency, Shai, the same nondescript apartment building at number 85 where Shiloah was now, three years later, showing Peter the photographs.
Shiloah grunted involuntarily. They made even his stomach curl.
“Horrific, but we don’t choose our enemies. And sometimes not our friends,” the spymaster said, gathering up the evidence. He repeated: “You leave in the morning. No contact from now on with anyone in Israel but me. Everything you need is in this envelope. People, profiles, addresses. You won’t travel with it, you will receive it again on location, sealed. In each case our goal is the same. And be very, very careful. These are killers.”
That night, torn between duty and desire, Peter decided Shiloah would never know he had had one last contact, and if he did, he’d approve. Peter took the stairs down to the office on the ground floor, where he found two sheets of paper, two envelopes, and a stamp. He sat at a desk and in the pool of light from the swivel lamp wrote a short note to go inside the first envelope: “Arie, my brother, please give this letter to Tamara.” He didn’t add anything else, Arie would understand that he could give no information about where he was.
Inside that envelope he folded the second envelope, addressed to Tamara, with a second brief note. In case her family read it, he wrote as discreetly as he could:
My Dear Tamara,
Stay away from my brother! But seriously, I want you to know how special our brief time together was. I hope that you will wait for me to return. I don’t know when that will be and this may be a lot to ask, but I feel and pray that I can ask this of you.
Peter
It was past midnight when he slipped the envelope addressed to Arie into the Frishman Street postbox and returned to his room at the Office. His suitcase ready for the early call, his papers in order, Peter fell into a deep, satisfied sleep, dreamt of Tamara, and woke with the sun as Wolf, alias Willi Stinglwagner.