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that.”
    It had taken me years to reconcile myself to my talents and find some kind of mental equilibrium. Having the family I do didn’t make it any easier. Falling in love with a difficult guy would take more energy than I could spare. I gathered up the cards and shoved them back into their box, slapped down the lid, and wrapped the entire thing up in a scarf to block the vibrations.
    I wandered back into the living room and flopped down on the couch. I was going to watch the nightly news—in my business you have to be a news junkie, no matter what the source—but what did I see onscreen but another lousy angel. It waved, then morphed into the face of the usual anchor, babbling about the state budget.
    Joseph and the coat of many colors. Lean years, then fat years? Sold into slavery in Egypt? I grabbed the remote and flipped channels until I found some ancient Looney Tunes, a fitting end to the day.

CHAPTER 2

    THE NEWLY CREATED Mr. Morrison strolled into the office around ten in the morning. Nathan had upgraded his suit to a navy blue pinstripe, a little too broad in the lapels, set off by a yellow and red silk tie, giving him just the right air of a small businessman trying to look like a big businessman.
    “Good morning,” I said brightly. “Sir.”
    He stopped in front of my desk, shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, and scowled at me. “I heard from your State Department this morning,” he said.
    “Good. Then you know I’m your handler.”
    “I know that they told me you were. There’s a difference. Listen, I don’t want interference.”
    “Then you don’t want my help. You can call me your liaison if that makes you feel better.”
    He snarled on past and slammed into the inner office. I let him brood while I called Aunt Eileen. I reached her answering machine, left a message about lunch, and hung up just as Nathan slammed out again. He’d taken off his suit jacket and the gun harness.
    “Yeah?” I said.
    “Come into my office, and I’ll finish briefing you.”
    I left the door between our offices open so I could hear the phone if Aunt Eileen returned my call, then followed him in. The gun lay on his desk in plain sight.
    “Can’t you put that thing away?” I said.
    He scowled, but he did shove the gun into a desk drawer.
    “This fellow, William Johnson,” he began, “we know him as an American who came to Israel to buy land for a Christian kibbutz.”
    “Christian? Does your government let Christians buy land?”
    “Why not? They’re a lot less obnoxious than the black hats.”
    “The who?”
    “Sorry. The haredi , the ultraorthodox. The ones who don’t want the streetcars to run on the Sabbath and think everyone should keep kosher and the like. The men all wear black hats. Hence the name, though it’s old-fashioned. Most people at home just call them ‘the blacks’ now, but that name won’t do here in America.”
    “No, it sure won’t.” I assumed then that life in the spiritual practices kibbutz had formed his opinion, but later I found out that a lot of Israelis felt as he did. “So Johnson had a legit reason to be there.”
    “No, as it turned out. The group he claimed to belong to doesn’t exist. We didn’t find that out until too late. The government doesn’t investigate every tourist who comes through. By all accounts he seemed like an ordinary sort of pilgrim, except he had a lot of money to flash around. We get them all the time, tour buses full of Americans babbling about Bethlehem and the footsteps of Jesus.”
    “Yeah, I know the type.” Most of my relatives, I thought.
    “So,” Nathan continued. “As far as the police can tell, he was using the land buy to give him an excuse to look for someone or something beyond the usual tourist routes. He may have found it—a young woman who worked for an estate agent who turned up dead two days after meeting him.”
    “May have?”
    “There was a lot of muddled evidence pointing to Johnson, but no motive and