Operation Shylock: A Confession (54 page)

“Not mine.”

“How much is in here?”

“I don’t know. I would think quite a lot.”

I had a violent urge to heave the envelope as far as I could out into the street, but then I saw the shopping cart crammed with all the worldly goods belonging to the black couple on the steps of the church and thought to just go over and drop it in there. “Three
thousand ducats,” I said to Smilesburger, repeating aloud for the first time since Athens the identifying code words that I’d been given to use by him before leaving on the mission purportedly for George.

“However much it is,” he said, “it’s yours.”

“For what? For services already rendered or for what I’m now being advised to do?”

“I found it in my briefcase when I got off the plane. Nobody has told me anything. I opened the briefcase on the way in from Kennedy. There it was.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted at him. “This is what they did to Pollard—shtupped the poor schnuk with money until he was compromised up to his ears!”

“Philip, I don’t want what doesn’t belong to me. I don’t wish to be accused of stealing what isn’t mine. I ask you please to take this off my hands before I am the one who is compromised in the middle of an affair where I no longer play any role. Look, you never put in for your Athens expenses. You charged the hotel to American Express and even got stuck with a big restaurant bill. Here. To cover the costs you incurred spying at the fountainhead of Western civilization.”

“I was thinking, just before, that I could have done much worse than you,” I said. “Now it’s hard to imagine how.” I held the envelope containing my manuscript under my arm while placing the envelope full of money back in the attaché case. “Here,” I said, snapping the case shut and offering it to Smilesburger, but he held tightly to his crutches, refusing to accept it back. “All right,” I said and, seeing that the woman who’d been sleeping beside her companion on the church steps was awake now and cautiously watching the two of us, I set the case down on the pavement before Smilesburger’s feet. “The Mossad Fund for Homeless Non-Jews.”

“No jokes, please—pick up the case,” he said, “and take it. You don’t know what could be in store for you otherwise. Take the money and do what they want. Ruining reputations is no less serious an intelligence operation than destroying nuclear reactors. When they are out to silence a voice they don’t like, they know how to accomplish it without the blundering of our Islamic brothers. They don’t
issue a stupid, barbaric
fatwa
that makes a martyred hero out of the author of a book that nobody can read—they quietly go to work on the reputation instead. And I don’t mean halfheartedly, as they did in the past with you, turning loose the intellectual stooges at their magazine. I mean hardball—
loshon hora:
the whispering campaign that cannot be stopped, rumors that it’s impossible to quash, besmirchment from which you will never be cleansed, slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits—your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice, your avarice, your indecency, your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. Insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. Idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Malicious absurdities. Galling wisecracks. Fantastic lies.
Loshon hora
of such spectacular dimensions that it is guaranteed not only to bring on fear, distress, disease, spiritual isolation, and financial loss but to significantly shorten a life. They will make a shambles of the position that you have worked nearly sixty years to achieve. No area of your life will go uncontaminated. And if you think this is an exaggeration you really
are
deficient in a sense of reality. Nobody can ever say of a secret service, ‘That’s something they don’t do.’ Knowledge is too dispersed for that conclusion to be drawn. They can only say, ‘Within my experience, it wasn’t done. And beyond that again, there’s always a first time.’ Philip, remember what happened to your friend Kosinski! The Chofetz Chaim wasn’t just whistling Dixie: there is no verbal excess, no angry word, no evil speech that is unutterable to a Jew with an unguarded tongue. You are
not
Jonathan Pollard—you are being neither abandoned nor disowned. Instead you are being given the benefit of a lifetime’s experience by someone who has developed the highest regard for you and cannot sit by and watch you destroyed. The consequences of what you’ve written are simply beyond calculation. I fear for you. Name a raw nerve and you recruit it. It is not a quiet book you’ve written—it is a
suicidal
book, even within the extremely Jewish stance you assume. Take the money, please. I beg
you. I beg you. Otherwise the misery you suffered from Moishe Pipik will seem like a drop in the bucket of humiliation and shame. They will turn you into a walking joke beside which Moishe Pipik will look like Elie Wiesel, speaking words that are only holy and pure. You’ll
yearn
for the indignities of a double like Pipik; when they get done desecrating you and your name, Pipik will seem the personification of modesty, dignity, and the passion for truth. Lead them not into temptation, because their creativity knows no bounds when the job is to assassinate the character even of a
tzaddik
like you. A righteous person, a man of moral rectitude, that is what I have come to understand you to be—and against the disgrace of such a person it is my human obligation to cry out! Philip, pick up the attaché case, take it home, and put the money in your mattress. Nobody will ever know.”

“And in return?”

“Let your Jewish conscience be your guide.”

Note to the Reader

This book is a work of fiction. The formal conversational exchange with Aharon Appelfeld quoted in chapters 3 and 4 first appeared in
The New York Times
on March 11, 1988; the verbatim minutes of the January 27, 1988, morning session of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem District Court provided the courtroom exchanges quoted in chapter 9. Otherwise the names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.

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