CHAPTER 26

Hands in the pockets of his cargo pants, Shlomo Uris paced restlessly about his office as he waited for the return of a telephone call. For a moment he paused at a long narrow side table under the window behind his desk where framed family photos were propped and arrayed. He picked one up. It was of Shlomo as a boy being held in the arms of his Uncle Moses. When the telephone rang he put the photo back down, turned around to his desk, and picked up the phone. “Hello, Uris. Yes? Yes, put it through for me, please.” As Uris waited, he looked down at a letter on his desktop. Originally addressed to the American Ambassador in Tel Aviv, it had come from a woman in Brooklyn, New York, gone through channels, and eventually landed on his desk. He’d gone back through the record of Mayo’s incoming telephone calls beginning three days before the onset of his illness and up to the day he had first voiced complaints about the problem with his stomach. The origin of one of those calls was striking because of a linkage to the letter from New York.

“Hello, yes? Can you hear me clearly? Good. Look, my name is Shlomo Uris. I’m an Inspector of Police in the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem. Right. Oh, well, greetings to you, too. Look, I’m calling about one of your people over here. It’s rather urgent. I need to ask you to wire a photo of him. No, no, no! No, not anyone. A certain one. I believe you’ve had inquiries about him from his mother. What’s that? No telephone number was given. The mother is partially deaf and—”

Uris listened for a moment and then nodded his head.

“Yes, that’s him,” he confirmed. “Dennis Mooney.”