Of Jews and Gentiles (10/12)
Chapter 33
The next day was Saturday, and as promised, Gibbs came with McGee and Abby for their post-services meeting, the boxes of photocopied and digital records and McGee's laptop in tow. As they had the day before, they split up the work, Tony and Ziva going over Saul Steiner's handwritten records, leaving the others with Elsa's longer computerized database.
“For such a small place, they sure have done a lot of business,” Tony complained after the first few hours, his eyes starting to swim from staring at Saul Steiner's small, neat handwriting.
“Saul moved to DC in 1950,” Ziva pointed out, her eyes still focused on the sheet she was studying, “and opened his jewelry store right away. That is almost sixty years of business.” Her eyes fell on the gold watch she wore, a smile tugging at her lips. “And he sells high-quality products.”
DiNozzo caught her eye and grinned, knowing what she was thinking: that he had done a good job finding something at a jewelry store that she would like. Gibbs caught the exchange without having to look up. “Don't get too attached, David. Vance still hasn't decided if you're keeping it or not.”
“I was speaking generally, Gibbs,” she replied. “McGee, are you having any luck?”
“None,” the junior field agent replied glumly. “I've run each of the names of the buyers through the search parameters that we came up with last night, and the only hits I've gotten are Shaw and Daltron.”
“Hey, I have both Shaw and Daltron over here,” DiNozzo said, suddenly realizing something that might be significant. “Just like Dr. Silvers said, Saul used to do all of the business-from 1950, when he opened, until 1989, when Elsa came back home to help him out, everything is logged in his records. Then Elsa came on, and all the routine orders disappeared from his book.”
“I guess Daddy couldn't be bothered with the simple sales anymore once Daughter moved back home,” Abby said.
“Right. So everything in his book after 1989 is custom orders, some of which are pretty impressive-a necklace for a First Lady, the restoration of a Swedish princess' broach, another necklace, this time for a Swiss banker. Ooh, there's a notation by that one-looks like the Swiss banker is buying some pretty hefty jewelry for a mistress.”
“The point, DiNozzo?” Gibbs asked.
“Right. Sorry, Boss. Most of his custom orders are engagement rings.”
“There are quite a few engagement rings over here, too, Tony.”
“Well, yeah. Not everyone is going to be spending twenty-eight thousand dollars for a custom ring like Dr. Silvers.” He flipped through the pages until he found the one he was looking for and pointed it out. “Or even taking a grandmother's diamond and having it placed in a new setting like Lt. Shaw,” he said triumphantly, turning a few pages to point to a recent entry. “Daltron also had Steiner design an engagement ring for him, a two-point-seven carat colorless, flawless round-cut diamond, on a platinum band encrusted with black diamond chips, if I have my diamond short-hand right.”
“Wow,” Abby commented. “That's like the Rolls-Royce of engagement rings.”
“Comes with a Rolls-Royce price-tag, too. That ring set our poor murder victim back almost eighty grand. The solitaire alone was about fifty thousand, and black diamonds, even in chips, aren't cheap.”
“What did Daltron do for a living, run a drug cartel?” Abby asked, her eyes wide. “That ring's like, more than my annual paycheck. Speaking of which, Gibbs, I need a raise.”
“Do I look like the director of NCIS?”
“No, actually, he's a bit taller than you, and a bit heavier. And he doesn't have as much gray hair. And he's black, but I thought that might be in bad taste to point out.”
“So what you're saying,” McGee said slowly, ignoring Abby's side comments, “is that someone is taking out the non-Jewish member of mixed couples buying custom engagement rings?”
“Sure seems that way,” DiNozzo agreed, handing over the stacks of photocopies gladly.
“Better run all of the custom orders, McGee, just to be safe,” Gibbs decided. McGee eyed the pile of papers and sighed.
“Sure, Boss.”
---
The agents had worked out a system: Ziva figured out what Saul Steiner's shorthand notations meant, allowing them to eliminate men who were buying jewelry for their mistresses. They were going to skip over those who were already married as well, but Gibbs pointed out that since they originally thought the Gans case, in which a married couple was killed, was part of the pattern, they shouldn't be so quick to pass over intermarried couples. Abby, using the laptop from Ziva's office, made a list of names and purchases and who they were for to feed to McGee, running the search on his own laptop, while Tony, Ziva, and Gibbs poured through the records looking for names to give to Abby. It was efficient, but fairly slow-going.
“We need food,” DiNozzo finally declared when the rumble of his stomach inspired him to check his watch to find that was nearing 2030.
“I will cook,” Ziva said quickly, her mind growing numb from so many hours of sifting through papers.
“No,” Gibbs replied shortly. “We need you working on this. We'll order takeout and eat while we work.” She sat down again with a dejected look on her face while Tony went to find the Georgetown restaurant guide that he had picked up a few weeks before.
Half an hour of searching the tiny handwriting of Saul Steiner later, the ringing of the doorbell announced the arrival of their dinner. “Finally,” DiNozzo muttered as he rose to answer the door. He used his Dinallo credit card to pay for the meal; he was pretty sure he'd be able to justify it to Vance if asked.
“Okay,” he said slowly, drawing sandwiches out of the bag to distribute. “Meatball sub. That's mine. Uh, french dip?”
“That would be me,” Abby said, holding her hands out to accept her food.
“That's pretty messy for a working dinner, Abs,” McGee pointed out. She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Then I guess I'm going to have to take a break from the computer, aren't I?” she replied archly, sitting cross-legged on the floor to use the coffee table as a table. McGee just rolled his eyes and waited for Tony to toss his sandwich at him, which he did a minute later.
“Cheesesteak?” Tony asked, pulling another from the bag.
“That is mine,” Ziva replied, holding her hand out. DiNozzo tsked loudly.
“Not exactly kosher, now is it?” he teased. “I guess I'll have to take this away from you.”
She narrowed her eyes into a glare. She wasn't in the best of moods to begin with, after spending the morning at the synagogue and the afternoon studying a jeweler's records, on all about four hours of sleep, and she didn't feel like playing games. “Fine,” she snapped, reaching for Tony's unopened sandwich. “Then I will have yours.”
“That's pork sausage,” he informed her. “And it has cheese. You can't eat that, either.”
“Then neither can you!” she exclaimed, taking it and reaching for her own dinner, which Tony was holding over her head.
“Neither of you gets either,” Gibbs finally intervened, taking both sandwiches from them.
“Boss!” DiNozzo protested, his voice whining. “Then what are we going to eat?”
“You can share mine,” he replied, grabbing the last sandwich from the bag. “Vegetable. Enjoy.”
“Forget it,” Ziva snapped, thrusting the sandwich into Tony's hands, who looked at it as if might contain something hazardous to his health. “I am making myself pancakes.”
“Oh!” Tony said, quickly perking up. “Make me some, too.” He didn't know what she said back to him in Hebrew, but judging by her tone of voice, it wasn't, “Yes, dear, I'll be glad to.”
---
Agent Gibbs was somewhat surprised to see Officer Ziva David sitting at her desk when he came into the building on Sunday morning. “What are you doing here?” he asked bluntly.
“Tony said the team is on-call this weekend. I figured you would be coming in.”
“The team is on-call, Ziva. You're not. And where's DiNozzo?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know, still asleep.” At least, he was close to it when she left the apartment after a round of post-run sex. “I needed to talk to you.”
He sighed; he had a feeling where this conversation would be going, and he wasn't sure he wanted to be having it. He glanced up to see Agent McGee enter the bullpen and head for his desk. “My office?” he asked. Ziva gave a perfunctory nod and led the way to the elevator.
As soon as the metal box began its descent, Gibbs reached over and flipped the emergency stop. “Okay, David, let's have it.”
“I think Tony is getting too involved in this mission,” she said, her voice coming out in a rush. “He is working almost non-stop on this case and hardly sleeping at all. He is beginning to correct my practices-you saw what happened last night with how he reacted to the non-kosher sandwiches-and if I'm not mistaken, he is beginning to pick up-”
Gibbs cut her off before she could give more examples of DiNozzo's actions over the last six weeks, since they first went undercover as Tony Dinallo and Ziva Kenig. “Are you sure it's DiNozzo you're worried about being too involved?” The sudden flush of her cheeks told him that he guessed that one correctly. “Don't think we don't know about you two and your extracurricular activities,” he warned.
She frowned slightly when he didn't say anything else. “You are not going to give me a lecture about the rules or slap me on the head?”
“Do you want me to?” he asked sarcastically. “Listen, you two are adults, and you're more than capable of making your own mistakes. We've seen enough of them over the last few years to know that that's true. Just keep it out of the office and don't let it affect your work. If I get the slightest impression that either of you won't be able to perform your duties because of what you do at home, I will end this mission right there and ship your ass back to Israel.” Her expressions were never easy to read, and this one was no exception. He sighed as he suddenly figured it out. “It's too late, isn't it? Your judgment is already impaired.”
“It is not!” she replied indignantly, her eyes flashing. “I have no problem fulfilling my duties. I have slept with men in the course of missions before without it affecting my work. This is no different.”
Although he didn't quite believe her words-at least, the part about it being no different-he didn't call her out on it. Instead, he asked, “And DiNozzo feels the same way?”
He saw that expression again, and suddenly figured it out: uncertainty. He realized then without a doubt that this wasn't just casual sex during an undercover mission anymore, at least not for her. He wondered if it ever had been. “I do not know,” she acknowledged, her voice softer than it was. “It is not something we have discussed.”
“Maybe that's something you should figure out before it's too late.” He didn't explain what he meant by that, knowing that she would be able to figure it out. When a mission got sour was a bad time to discover that too many personal feelings were involved. Jen Shepard had gotten a bullet in her thigh in the Czech Republic to prove that one.
When she didn't say anything else, he reached over and restarted the elevator. Before the doors opened back at the squadroom, he smacked her lightly in the bad of the head, but with a small smile on his face, much like the first time he had given her that particular gesture. “What was that for?” she asked.
“Breaking rule twelve.”
Chapter 34
Agent Tony DiNozzo was barely a foot into the bullpen at NCIS when Agent Tim McGee called for his attention. “Tony,” he said, “I think I have something.”
“Don't worry, Probie, chlamydia is very easily treated,” DiNozzo joked.
“What? No!” McGee exclaimed, his eyes wide and darting around to see if anybody heard. His voice lowered several decimals. “With the case, Tony.”
“Oh,” DiNozzo said, as if he hadn't figured that out already. “Well?” he asked when McGee didn't fill him in. “What is it?”
“I've been running the names from Saul Steiner's custom jewelry orders into our search, and I found a couple of hits.” He used the remote sitting on his desk to activate the plasma screen. “Jonathan Wallace died in a car accident three and a half years ago, a week after he put in an order with Steiner for an engagement ring, and about two years ago, Manar al-Bashier, an Egyptian grad student at American University died of, quote, natural causes. No autopsy. Her boyfriend, Michael Levanthal, had Steiner place his late mother's diamond in a new setting for an engagement ring. He was listed in the obituary.”
“So now it's looking like Wallace, Daltron, al-Bashier, Quinn, then Shaw,” DiNozzo said thoughtfully. “So much for my theory of this being fueled by family anger at Lena Rosen's relationship.”
“It wasn't much of a theory to begin with,” McGee pointed out. DiNozzo ignored him and continued his line of thought.
“All after buying custom-made engagement rings from Steiner's Jewelers.”
“I wrote a program to search the engagement ring purchases in Elsa Steiner's records against deaths registered, but nothing came up,” McGee added.
“It's exclusively the custom orders.”
“Right,” McGee said with an enthusiastic nod.
“Well, good job, Probie. You've earned yourself a probie-snack,” DiNozzo joked, reaching into his desk to pull out a candy bar he had swiped from the vending machine. McGee, unprepared to catch, allowed the chocolate to hit him in the forehead, making DiNozzo chuckle as he reached for the phone. “Any connection between Wallace and al-Bashier and the synagogue?” he asked as he dialed.
“Uh, I don't know,” McGee replied reluctantly. “I've just been running the names from Steiner's records. I figured you could find out.”
“Do I have to do everything around here?” DiNozzo complained. “Don't make me take away that probie-snack.” McGee's hand closed around the confiscated candy bar protectively.
---
“Michelle Geld grew up here in DC and has been a member of the congregation in Georgetown her entire life,” DiNozzo explained a few hours later as McGee, Gibbs, and Ziva listened closely. “She left to attend Columbia University when she was eighteen and majored in classical studies. She came back to DC four years later to teach Latin and Greek at one of the fine private schools here in the District. She also brought back a boyfriend, Jonathan Wallace, who was beginning medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. He was killed in a car crash halfway through his second year. That was three and a half years ago.”
“Which service?” Gibbs asked. USUHS was the military's medical school, and had students in the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Public Health Commissioned Corps.
“Public Health,” DiNozzo replied with a nod. “So his death falls under civilian jurisdiction, but we could probably take over the investigation without too many complaints. He died in Maryland, and the Ann Arudel cops concluded that it was a sudden failure of the power steering system. He ran off the road when his car couldn't turn. No passengers, no other cars.”
“And the other one?”
“Manar al-Bashier,” DiNozzo continued. “Egyptian graduate student earning her degree in international law at American University. This is where things get a little hinky, to borrow Abby's favorite word. She was going to be losing her student visa as soon as she graduated, which would have been a few months after she died. I don't know if their relationship was legitimate or not, but it almost looks like her and Michael Levanthal were looking for a way to keep her in the country. I spoke to a few of their former classmates, and only one of them knew that al-Bashier and Levanthal were seeing each other, but she didn't think it was very serious. He was described as, quote, your typical good little Jewish boy. Everyone knew that he couldn't be reached from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday because he was observing Shabbat.”
“And al-Bashier is a Muslim name,” Ziva pointed out.
“Exactly. Not exactly a union to make either family all that happy.”
“Anything from before Wallace?” Gibbs asked.
Both DiNozzo and McGee shook their heads, but it was McGee who spoke. “Nothing, Boss. I checked through Steiner's custom engagement ring orders for the last ten years. Wallace was the first to be listed in the death records.”
“That does not make any sense,” Ziva said with a frown. “If Steiner is the one orchestrating the deaths, we would have expected them to begin in 1950, when he first opened his store.”
They all thought about that for a moment. “What if Steiner is saying something to someone?” McGee mused aloud. “Someone who's only been here for a few years?”
“That's good thinking, McGee,” Gibbs said after he had the chance to think about that for a minute. He turned to his two other agents, his expression strangely amused. “Congratulations, Ziva.”
“Gibbs?” she asked, confused.
“You're about to be engaged.”
---
Tony DiNozzo's hand clenched tightly on the gear shift of his Mustang as he shifted the car into fifth gear more harshly than he should have. He didn't even bother apologizing to the car, something he usually would have done. He was annoyed. Annoyed at Gibbs, at himself, at the mission-hell, he was pretty much annoyed at the world.
Everything had been going well until two days ago, when Gibbs had made his joke about Ziva being about to be engaged. Since then, she had barely looked at him and had made up excuses not to come by the office after her last lecture. He had slept alone in his apartment for the last two nights, the longest stretch in the last six weeks, and discovered that he didn't like it.
He downshifted just as angrily as before as he tried to sift things out in his mind. What was she so worked up about? The whole damn mission had been her idea in the first place. How was she okay with a fake relationship, but bothered by a fake engagement?
He had to admit, the idea of shopping for an engagement ring left him feeling a little funny, too, and the idea that said engagement ring was for a woman he had joked with and flirted with, protected and been protected by, slept with and practically lived with, a woman he respected and cared for and honestly liked-well, maybe that was hitting just a little too close to him, and maybe it was a little bit too personal for her, too. Or maybe she just found the idea of being engaged to Tony DiNozzo so repulsive she couldn't stand the sight of him. He managed a slight smile at that one. Neither of them was really the marrying kind, when you got down to it.
The plan was simple. DiNozzo-or, rather, Dinallo-would go into Steiner's Jewelry with plans to design an engagement ring. McGee had got a warrant granting permission to tap Steiner's work and home phones, as well as Elsa Steiner's cell phone (Saul didn't have one), and their computers both at home in the office, and they would see whom, if anyone, Steiner contacted after Dinallo left.
DiNozzo had his doubts about there being an immediate phone call or email as soon as he left the building. Somehow, he didn't see an old Jewish jeweler knowingly set up his clients to be murdered--especially before their orders were completed and paid for. He was pretty sure that, had Steiner said anything to anyone at all, it was in the form of an innocent comment, without any expectations that the person he was confiding in would become homicidal at the news. Still thinking that the synagogue somehow played a roll in things, they would arrange another agent to tail Steiner that coming Saturday and report back on everyone the man spoke to.
He took a deep breath to calm his nerves as he pulled into the parking garage a block away from Steiner's Jewelers in Georgetown, and another before getting out of the car. By the time he walked through the doors of the jewelry store, he was wearing the same uncertain smile he had the last time he visited, when he had left with the gold Rolex watch. “Ah, Mr. Dinallo,” Elsa Steiner greeted him with her wide smile/grimace. “Welcome back. What can we do for you today?”
He swallowed and glanced around the store before his eyes returned to severe-looking woman. He put a slightly uneven smile on his face, and wondered if he was looking as green as he felt. “I think it's time for me to be checking out the rings.”
Chapter 35
Elsa Steiner blinked once, almost in surprise, at the words of the man she knew as Anthony Dinallo, remembering his reaction to her suggesting that they look at the rings last time he was there. Still, she was there to sell jewelry, so she put such thoughts aside and gave him a wide grin. “Congratulations!” she said, as brightly as she could manage.
He chuckled uneasily. “Well, I wouldn't say congratulations are in order yet. I haven't exactly asked anything.”
“Well, in my experience, very few men who ask get turned down.”
“How do you figure?”
She gave a shrug. “We don't get many returns on engagement rings,” she said simply. Her words were met with a smile and uneasy chuckle.
“Yeah, I guess that would be a good indication.”
“The diamond rings are over here,” she said, guiding him toward a large section near the back of the store, a fact he remembered distinctly from the last time he was there, just because of the visceral reaction that they had caused.
This part was planned out: DiNozzo would study the rings, ask to see a number of them, before deciding that none were really what he was looking for. He had fairly specific ideas in mind, he would say, and these weren't really it; maybe he'd have more luck elsewhere? Hopefully, Elsa would be as good of a salesperson as her records seemed to indicate, at which point she would mention that her father makes custom-designed rings. Then, with any luck, it would be time to meet Saul Steiner, and things would go from there.
“Our platinum solitaires are the most popular these days,” Elsa began as DiNozzo stared down into the rows of rings, feeling as lost as he was pretending to be. He shook his head slowly.
“I don't think so,” he said. “I've only ever seen Ziva wearing gold jewelry.”
“Yellow gold or white gold?”
He blinked at the question, giving her what must be the familiar expression of a man who thought 'gold' meant 'yellow gold'. “Yellow,” he finally said. She nodded slightly.
“We don't sell as many of these as we used to,” she said, pulling a display of yellow gold solitaires from the display case and setting them on the counter. “Have you given much thought to size?”
“Oh,” he said. “I really don't know what her ring size would be.”
Elsa smiled politely. “I meant the size of the diamond.”
“Oh!” he replied before giving her an embarrassed smile. “Nothing too big.” His eyes widened slightly with the realization of how that sounded. “Not that she doesn't deserve something bigger, or I can't afford it-”
“It's more about what the woman would want to wear than what the man can afford,” Elsa interrupted. DiNozzo grinned.
“Exactly.”
“Well, we have these two here,” she said, pointing out two rings. “This one is three-quarters of a carat, and this one is a tiny bit over one carat.”
He pretended to study both for several minutes before shaking his head. “They're both nice,” he said finally, “but not really what I was thinking. With any luck, she'll have this for the rest of her life. I want it to be just right. Maybe somewhere else-”
“Actually, Mr. Dinallo, my father opened this store as a custom jewelry store almost sixty years ago,” Elsa interrupted. “He still does custom orders. You can pick out your stone and the setting yourself. That way, you can be sure to get exactly what you're looking for.”
“Really?” DiNozzo asked, brightening. “That sounds perfect.”
Elsa gave him another smile/grimace. “I believe my father is back in his workshop right now. If you don't mind waiting here for a moment, I'll ask if it's okay if I send you right back.” She returned the pillow of rings to the glass display counter and locked it before walking through a well-concealed door in the back of the store.
She returned a minute later with what he supposed was an encouraging smile. “He said that now is a good time,” she informed him. “Come around this way and I'll led you back.”
Saul Steiner was wearing almost comically-thick jeweler's glasses as he was sitting at a workbench, a small tray of loose diamonds in front of him. He didn't rise to greet DiNozzo, but wasn't being rude; the wheelchair he sat in was a pretty good indication that he couldn't.
Still, the octogenarian offered a withered yet steady hand to the younger man, who shook it confidently. “Welcome to my workshop, Mr. Dinallo,” Steiner rasped. “Please, have a seat. Let's talk.” As DiNozzo sat, he removed his jeweler's glasses and replaced them with a pair of bifocals that seemed almost as thick. “So I understand you're in the market for an engagement ring.”
“That's right,” DiNozzo replied with a nod. “And I understand you're the one to help me.”
Steiner guffawed a few times at that. “I like to think so,” he replied. “Have you given this much thought?”
“The ring, or getting married?” DiNozzo joked, earning him another round of laughter that left the old man slightly breathless.
“Ah, I hope your future wife appreciates a good sense of humor,” he managed after he caught his breath.
“She tolerates it. I think that's as much as I can ask for.”
Steiner smiled, his eyes appearing far away. “My wife, Tali, rest her soul, I think was the same way. She used to tell me that she wished she married someone half as funny as I thought I was.”
“Tali?” DiNozzo asked, surprised.
“Well, that is what I called her. It's short for Talitha. A good Hebrew name.” He frowned slightly. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“No, not at all,” DiNozzo said quickly. “It's just, my girlfriend, Ziva, she had a sister named Tali. I've never heard it anywhere else, that's all.”
“Ah,” Steiner replied. He studied the younger man for a few seconds. “You said she had a sister?”
“She died when she was sixteen. Hamas suicide bomber.” He paused, then added, probably unnecessarily, “Ziva's from Israel.”
Steiner tsked lightly as he shook his head. “My brother Ephraim, he tried to convince me to join him in Israel-of course, it was still Palestine then-after we left Germany, but I told him my place was in America, and two hours after I stepped off the boat, with only the shirt on my back and the name of a dead jeweler I apprenticed with as a reference, I walked into a jewelry store looking for a job and was greeted by the owner's daughter. Three months later, we were married.” He smiled at the memory and leaned back in his wheelchair.
“Tali,” DiNozzo said with a smile. Steiner nodded.
“She was also the one who told me that her father's business was failing, and instead of working for him, I should open my own store. Well, I did that, and sure enough, my father-in-law's store went out of business.” He leaned forward, as if sharing a secret. “I offered him a job, but the poor schmuck had too much pride to ever consider working for me.” He guffawed again before waving a hand dismissively. “But enough about that. You did not come here to hear an old man's stories about a time before you were born. You came about a ring. Let us get started.” He slid the tray of loose diamonds he had been studying over to DiNozzo. “These just came last week from Belgium. They have been independently marked and appraised. If I were in the business of selling rouge diamonds, I would have retired to Palm Springs with a woman half my age years ago.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Now, if your lady is from Israel, she knows diamonds, so I am only going to show you the very best that we have. If you do not find anything to your liking here, I have a few others I can show you.”
DiNozzo stared down into the tray, looking as lost as he felt. “I don't know what I'm looking for,” he admitted. Steiner chuckled again.
“Most people don't,” he said conspiratorially. “Let's start with size. Despite what the ladies claim, size really does matter.” He gave DiNozzo a large wink before using his tweezers to pluck one from the tray. “This is two carats.”
“That's a bit large,” DiNozzo said, shaking his head. “Ziva doesn't wear anything big and flashy. She's an officer in the IDF, so I want to get her something she could wear even when she's in uniform.”
“Ah, okay,” Steiner replied, replacing the diamond before glancing up sharply at DiNozzo, pointing at him with the tweezers. “I believe I have seen your Ziva. At the synagogue a few blocks away from here, no? Pretty young thing, dark curly hair?”
“That would be her,” DiNozzo confirmed with a grin.
“You are a lucky one, then, Mr. Dinallo. When I saw her a few weeks ago, I turned to my friend Bertie and asked who that gorgeous krasavitse was, and he told me I'd have to be fifty years younger to handle a woman like that.” He chuckled before grabbing another gem with his tweezers. “This one, I believe, is one point one carats. This is more of what you are looking for, no?”
“That seems about right,” DiNozzo nodded, studying the diamond at the end of Steiner's tweezers and trying to picture it in a ring. When he did that, he found himself picturing it on Ziva's hand, and had to struggled to suppress the urge to shake his head free of the image.
“That is what I figured,” Steiner agreed, still examining it. “Now, are you familiar with the grading of color and flaws of a diamond?”
“Slightly,” DiNozzo replied. Ziva had given him a lesson in it as they were studying Steiner's records. The old man nodded.
“This one is a G. It isn't quite colorless. It has a bit of a yellowish glint to it, which you have to be in the right light to see.”
“I think I want something completely colorless,” DiNozzo replied. To his surprise, Steiner shook his head slightly.
“As much as I want to help you take the most expensive stone out of my store, I am going to spare your wallet for a minute to talk about settings. Now, if you want yellow gold, even the most colorless diamond is going to reflect the color from the setting and give it a slight yellowish tint. You can save yourself a few thousand dollars if you go with a G or maybe even as high as an I.” He wagged a finger at DiNozzo and shook his head slightly. “Heaven help me, I must be getting soft in my old age, but I like you, young man, and you made me laugh, which is why I am helping you out here.”
“And I appreciate it,” DiNozzo joked. “As does my wallet.” And my director. “Yes, I was thinking about a yellow gold setting.”
“That is what I assumed, having seen your lovely lady. Not many women these days seem to like yellow gold engagement rings-everyone wants the white gold or the platinum, but your Ziva looked like a very classy type of woman, the kind of woman who wears real gold jewelry. So, are you going to be getting married in Israel?”
DiNozzo blinked at the non-sequitur before shaking his head slightly. “We haven't talked about it. Well, to be perfectly honest, we haven't talked about anything vaguely resembling marriage yet.”
“Ah,” Steiner said with understanding. “So you are preparing for the inevitable.”
DiNozzo flinched slightly at the word 'inevitable', but Steiner didn't seem to notice. “Something like that,” he said with a chuckle. “I think I need to figure out if I'm going to convert before we can make decisions about where we would be married.”
“Ah, you are not Jewish then?” Steiner asked with sudden interest. DiNozzo shook his head.
“I'm not much of anything,” he admitted, which was true. He vaguely remembered his mother saying something about baptizing him when he was a baby, but with the exception of a few Christmas Eve and Easter masses, he didn't have much of a connection with the Catholic church. “Ziva and I are involved in an adult education class that the Grossmans teach.”
“Ah, yes,” Steiner said, a trace of sadness in his voice. “My great-niece, Lena-Tali's brother's granddaughter-she was rather seriously dating a Gentile a couple of years ago. They were involved in that class. He was trying to convert so they could get married.” He shook his head sadly. “I was going to design her engagement ring, too. It was to be an exquisite piece, one of my best, but Scott-Lena's boyfriend-died of poisoning of all things before it was complete.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head again. “Such a shame, such a shame. But that's not important now,” he said, brightening again. “Back to your ring for your beautiful lady.”
Chapter 36
The sound of the piano stopped abruptly at the ringing of the doorbell of the Georgetown condo, much to Tony DiNozzo's regret. He had been standing in the hallway for almost five minutes listening to the music and wondering what he was going to say when the door opened.
Ziva had already turned and headed back toward the living room when the door finished swinging open. “Hello to you, too,” DiNozzo said jokingly.
“I have had a long day, Tony. If this is not related to the case, I am not interested in hearing about it right now.”
He paused for a moment before sliding the long thin box he was carrying onto the kitchen counter. “I brought pizza,” he finally offered. “I would have gotten flowers, but then I realized I didn't know what I would be apologizing for, so I figured this would be a better approach. Tastier, too. Besides, after spending literally the entire afternoon at a jewelry store, I didn't have the energy to handle the florist as well.”
Ziva sighed as she turned back to face her partner. “I am sorry, Tony. I have been rather bitchy the last few days.” She opened the pizza box and was faced with a cheese pizza. Entirely cheese, no pepperoni. She glanced up at Tony, an expression of confusion on her face. “You are not eating?”
“Why, are you so hungry you're eating that whole thing by yourself?”
“No, it is just...” She tilted the pizza toward him. “You do not like cheese pizza.”
He shrugged. “I figured after giving you a hard time on Saturday that maybe I should make more of an effort to eat something kosher.”
“You do not have to do that,” she replied, but he caught the ghost of a smile behind her words. She was halfway through her first slice of pizza before she spoke again. “You went to see Saul Steiner, then?”
“Yeah,” he replied after swallowing another mouthful of the bland pizza. If ever he forgot why he liked pepperoni, he could use that moment as a reminder. “Be careful around him. He may be old, but he's feisty. And I think he has a thing for girls with dark curly hair.” He took another bite of his pizza. “Actually, judging by half of the things he was saying, he has a thing for girls period.”
“Ah, so you have something in common.”
He grinned. “Only if you're referring to the dark curly hair comment.”
She rolled her eyes and looked away. “Idiot,” she muttered, but he could see her smile. “Did you learn anything other than his preference for female company?”
“He gave me a rather long lecture about diamond grading.”
Another eye roll. “About the case, Tony.”
“He seemed interested when I brought up the fact that I wasn't Jewish, but not overtly disapproving. In fact, after I mentioned the Grossman's class at the synagogue, he brought up Lena Rosen and Scott Daltron, and seemed pretty sad about that. Of course, he could have just been sad about not being able to complete the ring he and Daltron designed. He talked about that in great length.”
“Hmm,” Ziva said, her mouthful full of pizza. She swallowed and continued, “You may have been right when you said that Steiner's comments, if he makes any comments at all, were not done maliciously. Maybe he is just a gossipy old man.”
“He's definitely a gossipy old man. I can tell you stories about half of the pillars of the Jewish community of DC.”
She smiled thinly. “Any luck with the phones or email?”
“McGee hasn't contacted me with anything, so I don't think so. If he's going to talk, it'll be Saturday at the synagogue after services. Whoever we get to tail him is going to have to stay close enough to hear what he says.”
“Will that be McGee?”
He shook his head. “The daughter knows McGee from the court order, remember? What about Gibbs? Think you can get him in a kippah for a few hours of reconnaissance?” They both smiled at the mental image.
They switched to small talk for the duration of the dinner. Despite Tony's claims to not like cheese pizza, he ate seven slices to Ziva's three. It looked like he'd be getting up for the morning run the next day, regardless of where he was sleeping.
The thoughts of the sleeping arrangement caused the smile to drop from his face as he thought about sleeping alone the last few nights. “Are we going to talk about what's been bothering you for the last couple of days?” he asked. No use beating around the bush.
Her smile also fell instantly from her face. “It is not important,” she said stiffly.
“Your lips say no, but your eyes won't shut up,” he said, paraphrasing one of his first comments to her after their reunion from the summer apart. She shook her head, but he had already seen what he was looking for. Everyone else seemed to think that Ziva was the unfeeling, uncaring Mossad automaton that she often wanted them to think she was. Sometimes, Tony felt like he was the only person to see the real Ziva David, the one who regretted that she had grown up so fast, who mourned two dead siblings, who let her guard down when she played the piano or hummed while she cooked. There was a vulnerability there, an uncertainty, and sometimes, he wondered if she was able to see that in herself.
And as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. “No, Tony, I do not want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do,” he replied. He knew bullying a trained assassin with four-five? he wasn't sure if she had rearranged the weaponry in the last couple of days-loaded guns seconds away wasn't the brightest idea, but he was fairly certain she wouldn't hurt him. At least, that's what he was hoping. “You've been avoiding me since Gibbs assigned me to check out engagement rings,” he pointed out before putting on a falsely chipper smile. “It's just for the mission, Ziva. We don't really have to marry me.”
“You are relieved by that, no?” she asked bitingly, and his smile dropped.
“What are you saying, Ziva? Marriage? We both know that we'd both need years of intensive therapy to bring either of us to that point,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. When that fell through, he changed tactics. “What do you think this is for me, just another mission? I wouldn't be here eating cheese pizza and trying to remember if I have clean running socks in your apartment if that were true.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I want to be here,” he said emphatically. She shook her head slightly, but he wasn't sure if it was in denial of his statement or for some other reason. She rose from the barstool she had been sitting on and began pacing the area between the kitchen and dining room.
“I had not been in Mossad long when Tali was killed,” she finally said. “I was still in my training period, but I came home anyway. We were supposed to be mourning, but my father and I still completed my training exercises while I was home, when my mother was not around to see what we were doing. After my month of mourning was complete, I left and began to seek vengeance.”
“An eye for an eye,” he commented. She shook her head.
“I did not go after their teenagers, as they went after ours,” she said bitterly. “I spent a year infiltrating Hamas and removing those with direct links to Tali's murder. I would have continued, to strike their very center, but my father pulled me out. He said I was done, that it was over, that I had killed those who killed my sister, and to stay in longer would only lead to my own death. He said I was no longer objective and it was time to go home.” Her father's words, spoken to her a decade ago, seemed to echo with the words spoken by Tony in her dream much more recently.
“I was not supposed to be Metsada,” she continued, her eyes focused on a memory far away. “When I was recruited for Mossad, it was to be in Intelligence, as my father had been, but an instructor took an interest in my talents and transferred me to Operations. Had he not done that, I never would have gone after Hamas after Tali's death.”
“You wouldn't be the person you are now.”
“No, I would not,” she agreed. “But I sometimes wonder if I would have been a better person than I am now.”
“There's nothing wrong with you, Ziva.”
She smiled thinly to acknowledge the comment before continuing. “When I had left home after Tali's death, my parents were still in mourning. A sibling is expected to mourn for a month; a parent, for a year. When my father had called me home after my year with Hamas, I discovered that my mother had left Israel and returned to Russia, where she was born and still had family. She claimed otherwise, but I knew that Tali had always been her favorite-her 'little Natalia' was what she always called her-and after Tali's death, she found that she could not bring herself to stay. Of our family, Tali was the best of us, and when she was gone, there was nothing left. My mother needed someone to blame for that, and as she could not put a face to the man that killed Tali, she began to blame my father. She blamed him for not doing enough to prevent that attack, she blamed him for almost three decades of putting his career before his family.” She took a deep breath and added, “She blamed him for taking her one remaining child and making me like him. She left because she could no longer deal with being married to a Mossad officer and could not face the fact that she helped to raise another.” She didn't add what she was thinking, that in the ten years since her parents divorced and her mother moved to Russia, that she had only seen her twice, and once was during an anti-terrorism operation in Eastern Europe. She had taken a week-long break from the mission without a word as to her destination to Jen Shepard and caught the first train to Moscow. After only two days, the guilt that they both felt about the past was almost too oppressive for either to handle. “At first, I was angry with her for leaving, but gradually, I began to understand why she did it. It is not easy to live with a Mossad officer.”
And Tony knew that that was what this was about. He rose from the barstool where he had been silently listening and stopped his partner in her pacing, wrapping his arms around her tightly. She didn't return the gesture, but neither did she pull away. They continued to stand there for an unknown length of time. “If you're trying to scare me away, you're going to have to do better than that,” he finally said, his words somewhere between joking and serious, “because I'm not going anywhere.”
The next day was Saturday, and as promised, Gibbs came with McGee and Abby for their post-services meeting, the boxes of photocopied and digital records and McGee's laptop in tow. As they had the day before, they split up the work, Tony and Ziva going over Saul Steiner's handwritten records, leaving the others with Elsa's longer computerized database.
“For such a small place, they sure have done a lot of business,” Tony complained after the first few hours, his eyes starting to swim from staring at Saul Steiner's small, neat handwriting.
“Saul moved to DC in 1950,” Ziva pointed out, her eyes still focused on the sheet she was studying, “and opened his jewelry store right away. That is almost sixty years of business.” Her eyes fell on the gold watch she wore, a smile tugging at her lips. “And he sells high-quality products.”
DiNozzo caught her eye and grinned, knowing what she was thinking: that he had done a good job finding something at a jewelry store that she would like. Gibbs caught the exchange without having to look up. “Don't get too attached, David. Vance still hasn't decided if you're keeping it or not.”
“I was speaking generally, Gibbs,” she replied. “McGee, are you having any luck?”
“None,” the junior field agent replied glumly. “I've run each of the names of the buyers through the search parameters that we came up with last night, and the only hits I've gotten are Shaw and Daltron.”
“Hey, I have both Shaw and Daltron over here,” DiNozzo said, suddenly realizing something that might be significant. “Just like Dr. Silvers said, Saul used to do all of the business-from 1950, when he opened, until 1989, when Elsa came back home to help him out, everything is logged in his records. Then Elsa came on, and all the routine orders disappeared from his book.”
“I guess Daddy couldn't be bothered with the simple sales anymore once Daughter moved back home,” Abby said.
“Right. So everything in his book after 1989 is custom orders, some of which are pretty impressive-a necklace for a First Lady, the restoration of a Swedish princess' broach, another necklace, this time for a Swiss banker. Ooh, there's a notation by that one-looks like the Swiss banker is buying some pretty hefty jewelry for a mistress.”
“The point, DiNozzo?” Gibbs asked.
“Right. Sorry, Boss. Most of his custom orders are engagement rings.”
“There are quite a few engagement rings over here, too, Tony.”
“Well, yeah. Not everyone is going to be spending twenty-eight thousand dollars for a custom ring like Dr. Silvers.” He flipped through the pages until he found the one he was looking for and pointed it out. “Or even taking a grandmother's diamond and having it placed in a new setting like Lt. Shaw,” he said triumphantly, turning a few pages to point to a recent entry. “Daltron also had Steiner design an engagement ring for him, a two-point-seven carat colorless, flawless round-cut diamond, on a platinum band encrusted with black diamond chips, if I have my diamond short-hand right.”
“Wow,” Abby commented. “That's like the Rolls-Royce of engagement rings.”
“Comes with a Rolls-Royce price-tag, too. That ring set our poor murder victim back almost eighty grand. The solitaire alone was about fifty thousand, and black diamonds, even in chips, aren't cheap.”
“What did Daltron do for a living, run a drug cartel?” Abby asked, her eyes wide. “That ring's like, more than my annual paycheck. Speaking of which, Gibbs, I need a raise.”
“Do I look like the director of NCIS?”
“No, actually, he's a bit taller than you, and a bit heavier. And he doesn't have as much gray hair. And he's black, but I thought that might be in bad taste to point out.”
“So what you're saying,” McGee said slowly, ignoring Abby's side comments, “is that someone is taking out the non-Jewish member of mixed couples buying custom engagement rings?”
“Sure seems that way,” DiNozzo agreed, handing over the stacks of photocopies gladly.
“Better run all of the custom orders, McGee, just to be safe,” Gibbs decided. McGee eyed the pile of papers and sighed.
“Sure, Boss.”
---
The agents had worked out a system: Ziva figured out what Saul Steiner's shorthand notations meant, allowing them to eliminate men who were buying jewelry for their mistresses. They were going to skip over those who were already married as well, but Gibbs pointed out that since they originally thought the Gans case, in which a married couple was killed, was part of the pattern, they shouldn't be so quick to pass over intermarried couples. Abby, using the laptop from Ziva's office, made a list of names and purchases and who they were for to feed to McGee, running the search on his own laptop, while Tony, Ziva, and Gibbs poured through the records looking for names to give to Abby. It was efficient, but fairly slow-going.
“We need food,” DiNozzo finally declared when the rumble of his stomach inspired him to check his watch to find that was nearing 2030.
“I will cook,” Ziva said quickly, her mind growing numb from so many hours of sifting through papers.
“No,” Gibbs replied shortly. “We need you working on this. We'll order takeout and eat while we work.” She sat down again with a dejected look on her face while Tony went to find the Georgetown restaurant guide that he had picked up a few weeks before.
Half an hour of searching the tiny handwriting of Saul Steiner later, the ringing of the doorbell announced the arrival of their dinner. “Finally,” DiNozzo muttered as he rose to answer the door. He used his Dinallo credit card to pay for the meal; he was pretty sure he'd be able to justify it to Vance if asked.
“Okay,” he said slowly, drawing sandwiches out of the bag to distribute. “Meatball sub. That's mine. Uh, french dip?”
“That would be me,” Abby said, holding her hands out to accept her food.
“That's pretty messy for a working dinner, Abs,” McGee pointed out. She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Then I guess I'm going to have to take a break from the computer, aren't I?” she replied archly, sitting cross-legged on the floor to use the coffee table as a table. McGee just rolled his eyes and waited for Tony to toss his sandwich at him, which he did a minute later.
“Cheesesteak?” Tony asked, pulling another from the bag.
“That is mine,” Ziva replied, holding her hand out. DiNozzo tsked loudly.
“Not exactly kosher, now is it?” he teased. “I guess I'll have to take this away from you.”
She narrowed her eyes into a glare. She wasn't in the best of moods to begin with, after spending the morning at the synagogue and the afternoon studying a jeweler's records, on all about four hours of sleep, and she didn't feel like playing games. “Fine,” she snapped, reaching for Tony's unopened sandwich. “Then I will have yours.”
“That's pork sausage,” he informed her. “And it has cheese. You can't eat that, either.”
“Then neither can you!” she exclaimed, taking it and reaching for her own dinner, which Tony was holding over her head.
“Neither of you gets either,” Gibbs finally intervened, taking both sandwiches from them.
“Boss!” DiNozzo protested, his voice whining. “Then what are we going to eat?”
“You can share mine,” he replied, grabbing the last sandwich from the bag. “Vegetable. Enjoy.”
“Forget it,” Ziva snapped, thrusting the sandwich into Tony's hands, who looked at it as if might contain something hazardous to his health. “I am making myself pancakes.”
“Oh!” Tony said, quickly perking up. “Make me some, too.” He didn't know what she said back to him in Hebrew, but judging by her tone of voice, it wasn't, “Yes, dear, I'll be glad to.”
---
Agent Gibbs was somewhat surprised to see Officer Ziva David sitting at her desk when he came into the building on Sunday morning. “What are you doing here?” he asked bluntly.
“Tony said the team is on-call this weekend. I figured you would be coming in.”
“The team is on-call, Ziva. You're not. And where's DiNozzo?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know, still asleep.” At least, he was close to it when she left the apartment after a round of post-run sex. “I needed to talk to you.”
He sighed; he had a feeling where this conversation would be going, and he wasn't sure he wanted to be having it. He glanced up to see Agent McGee enter the bullpen and head for his desk. “My office?” he asked. Ziva gave a perfunctory nod and led the way to the elevator.
As soon as the metal box began its descent, Gibbs reached over and flipped the emergency stop. “Okay, David, let's have it.”
“I think Tony is getting too involved in this mission,” she said, her voice coming out in a rush. “He is working almost non-stop on this case and hardly sleeping at all. He is beginning to correct my practices-you saw what happened last night with how he reacted to the non-kosher sandwiches-and if I'm not mistaken, he is beginning to pick up-”
Gibbs cut her off before she could give more examples of DiNozzo's actions over the last six weeks, since they first went undercover as Tony Dinallo and Ziva Kenig. “Are you sure it's DiNozzo you're worried about being too involved?” The sudden flush of her cheeks told him that he guessed that one correctly. “Don't think we don't know about you two and your extracurricular activities,” he warned.
She frowned slightly when he didn't say anything else. “You are not going to give me a lecture about the rules or slap me on the head?”
“Do you want me to?” he asked sarcastically. “Listen, you two are adults, and you're more than capable of making your own mistakes. We've seen enough of them over the last few years to know that that's true. Just keep it out of the office and don't let it affect your work. If I get the slightest impression that either of you won't be able to perform your duties because of what you do at home, I will end this mission right there and ship your ass back to Israel.” Her expressions were never easy to read, and this one was no exception. He sighed as he suddenly figured it out. “It's too late, isn't it? Your judgment is already impaired.”
“It is not!” she replied indignantly, her eyes flashing. “I have no problem fulfilling my duties. I have slept with men in the course of missions before without it affecting my work. This is no different.”
Although he didn't quite believe her words-at least, the part about it being no different-he didn't call her out on it. Instead, he asked, “And DiNozzo feels the same way?”
He saw that expression again, and suddenly figured it out: uncertainty. He realized then without a doubt that this wasn't just casual sex during an undercover mission anymore, at least not for her. He wondered if it ever had been. “I do not know,” she acknowledged, her voice softer than it was. “It is not something we have discussed.”
“Maybe that's something you should figure out before it's too late.” He didn't explain what he meant by that, knowing that she would be able to figure it out. When a mission got sour was a bad time to discover that too many personal feelings were involved. Jen Shepard had gotten a bullet in her thigh in the Czech Republic to prove that one.
When she didn't say anything else, he reached over and restarted the elevator. Before the doors opened back at the squadroom, he smacked her lightly in the bad of the head, but with a small smile on his face, much like the first time he had given her that particular gesture. “What was that for?” she asked.
“Breaking rule twelve.”
Chapter 34
Agent Tony DiNozzo was barely a foot into the bullpen at NCIS when Agent Tim McGee called for his attention. “Tony,” he said, “I think I have something.”
“Don't worry, Probie, chlamydia is very easily treated,” DiNozzo joked.
“What? No!” McGee exclaimed, his eyes wide and darting around to see if anybody heard. His voice lowered several decimals. “With the case, Tony.”
“Oh,” DiNozzo said, as if he hadn't figured that out already. “Well?” he asked when McGee didn't fill him in. “What is it?”
“I've been running the names from Saul Steiner's custom jewelry orders into our search, and I found a couple of hits.” He used the remote sitting on his desk to activate the plasma screen. “Jonathan Wallace died in a car accident three and a half years ago, a week after he put in an order with Steiner for an engagement ring, and about two years ago, Manar al-Bashier, an Egyptian grad student at American University died of, quote, natural causes. No autopsy. Her boyfriend, Michael Levanthal, had Steiner place his late mother's diamond in a new setting for an engagement ring. He was listed in the obituary.”
“So now it's looking like Wallace, Daltron, al-Bashier, Quinn, then Shaw,” DiNozzo said thoughtfully. “So much for my theory of this being fueled by family anger at Lena Rosen's relationship.”
“It wasn't much of a theory to begin with,” McGee pointed out. DiNozzo ignored him and continued his line of thought.
“All after buying custom-made engagement rings from Steiner's Jewelers.”
“I wrote a program to search the engagement ring purchases in Elsa Steiner's records against deaths registered, but nothing came up,” McGee added.
“It's exclusively the custom orders.”
“Right,” McGee said with an enthusiastic nod.
“Well, good job, Probie. You've earned yourself a probie-snack,” DiNozzo joked, reaching into his desk to pull out a candy bar he had swiped from the vending machine. McGee, unprepared to catch, allowed the chocolate to hit him in the forehead, making DiNozzo chuckle as he reached for the phone. “Any connection between Wallace and al-Bashier and the synagogue?” he asked as he dialed.
“Uh, I don't know,” McGee replied reluctantly. “I've just been running the names from Steiner's records. I figured you could find out.”
“Do I have to do everything around here?” DiNozzo complained. “Don't make me take away that probie-snack.” McGee's hand closed around the confiscated candy bar protectively.
---
“Michelle Geld grew up here in DC and has been a member of the congregation in Georgetown her entire life,” DiNozzo explained a few hours later as McGee, Gibbs, and Ziva listened closely. “She left to attend Columbia University when she was eighteen and majored in classical studies. She came back to DC four years later to teach Latin and Greek at one of the fine private schools here in the District. She also brought back a boyfriend, Jonathan Wallace, who was beginning medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. He was killed in a car crash halfway through his second year. That was three and a half years ago.”
“Which service?” Gibbs asked. USUHS was the military's medical school, and had students in the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Public Health Commissioned Corps.
“Public Health,” DiNozzo replied with a nod. “So his death falls under civilian jurisdiction, but we could probably take over the investigation without too many complaints. He died in Maryland, and the Ann Arudel cops concluded that it was a sudden failure of the power steering system. He ran off the road when his car couldn't turn. No passengers, no other cars.”
“And the other one?”
“Manar al-Bashier,” DiNozzo continued. “Egyptian graduate student earning her degree in international law at American University. This is where things get a little hinky, to borrow Abby's favorite word. She was going to be losing her student visa as soon as she graduated, which would have been a few months after she died. I don't know if their relationship was legitimate or not, but it almost looks like her and Michael Levanthal were looking for a way to keep her in the country. I spoke to a few of their former classmates, and only one of them knew that al-Bashier and Levanthal were seeing each other, but she didn't think it was very serious. He was described as, quote, your typical good little Jewish boy. Everyone knew that he couldn't be reached from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday because he was observing Shabbat.”
“And al-Bashier is a Muslim name,” Ziva pointed out.
“Exactly. Not exactly a union to make either family all that happy.”
“Anything from before Wallace?” Gibbs asked.
Both DiNozzo and McGee shook their heads, but it was McGee who spoke. “Nothing, Boss. I checked through Steiner's custom engagement ring orders for the last ten years. Wallace was the first to be listed in the death records.”
“That does not make any sense,” Ziva said with a frown. “If Steiner is the one orchestrating the deaths, we would have expected them to begin in 1950, when he first opened his store.”
They all thought about that for a moment. “What if Steiner is saying something to someone?” McGee mused aloud. “Someone who's only been here for a few years?”
“That's good thinking, McGee,” Gibbs said after he had the chance to think about that for a minute. He turned to his two other agents, his expression strangely amused. “Congratulations, Ziva.”
“Gibbs?” she asked, confused.
“You're about to be engaged.”
---
Tony DiNozzo's hand clenched tightly on the gear shift of his Mustang as he shifted the car into fifth gear more harshly than he should have. He didn't even bother apologizing to the car, something he usually would have done. He was annoyed. Annoyed at Gibbs, at himself, at the mission-hell, he was pretty much annoyed at the world.
Everything had been going well until two days ago, when Gibbs had made his joke about Ziva being about to be engaged. Since then, she had barely looked at him and had made up excuses not to come by the office after her last lecture. He had slept alone in his apartment for the last two nights, the longest stretch in the last six weeks, and discovered that he didn't like it.
He downshifted just as angrily as before as he tried to sift things out in his mind. What was she so worked up about? The whole damn mission had been her idea in the first place. How was she okay with a fake relationship, but bothered by a fake engagement?
He had to admit, the idea of shopping for an engagement ring left him feeling a little funny, too, and the idea that said engagement ring was for a woman he had joked with and flirted with, protected and been protected by, slept with and practically lived with, a woman he respected and cared for and honestly liked-well, maybe that was hitting just a little too close to him, and maybe it was a little bit too personal for her, too. Or maybe she just found the idea of being engaged to Tony DiNozzo so repulsive she couldn't stand the sight of him. He managed a slight smile at that one. Neither of them was really the marrying kind, when you got down to it.
The plan was simple. DiNozzo-or, rather, Dinallo-would go into Steiner's Jewelry with plans to design an engagement ring. McGee had got a warrant granting permission to tap Steiner's work and home phones, as well as Elsa Steiner's cell phone (Saul didn't have one), and their computers both at home in the office, and they would see whom, if anyone, Steiner contacted after Dinallo left.
DiNozzo had his doubts about there being an immediate phone call or email as soon as he left the building. Somehow, he didn't see an old Jewish jeweler knowingly set up his clients to be murdered--especially before their orders were completed and paid for. He was pretty sure that, had Steiner said anything to anyone at all, it was in the form of an innocent comment, without any expectations that the person he was confiding in would become homicidal at the news. Still thinking that the synagogue somehow played a roll in things, they would arrange another agent to tail Steiner that coming Saturday and report back on everyone the man spoke to.
He took a deep breath to calm his nerves as he pulled into the parking garage a block away from Steiner's Jewelers in Georgetown, and another before getting out of the car. By the time he walked through the doors of the jewelry store, he was wearing the same uncertain smile he had the last time he visited, when he had left with the gold Rolex watch. “Ah, Mr. Dinallo,” Elsa Steiner greeted him with her wide smile/grimace. “Welcome back. What can we do for you today?”
He swallowed and glanced around the store before his eyes returned to severe-looking woman. He put a slightly uneven smile on his face, and wondered if he was looking as green as he felt. “I think it's time for me to be checking out the rings.”
Chapter 35
Elsa Steiner blinked once, almost in surprise, at the words of the man she knew as Anthony Dinallo, remembering his reaction to her suggesting that they look at the rings last time he was there. Still, she was there to sell jewelry, so she put such thoughts aside and gave him a wide grin. “Congratulations!” she said, as brightly as she could manage.
He chuckled uneasily. “Well, I wouldn't say congratulations are in order yet. I haven't exactly asked anything.”
“Well, in my experience, very few men who ask get turned down.”
“How do you figure?”
She gave a shrug. “We don't get many returns on engagement rings,” she said simply. Her words were met with a smile and uneasy chuckle.
“Yeah, I guess that would be a good indication.”
“The diamond rings are over here,” she said, guiding him toward a large section near the back of the store, a fact he remembered distinctly from the last time he was there, just because of the visceral reaction that they had caused.
This part was planned out: DiNozzo would study the rings, ask to see a number of them, before deciding that none were really what he was looking for. He had fairly specific ideas in mind, he would say, and these weren't really it; maybe he'd have more luck elsewhere? Hopefully, Elsa would be as good of a salesperson as her records seemed to indicate, at which point she would mention that her father makes custom-designed rings. Then, with any luck, it would be time to meet Saul Steiner, and things would go from there.
“Our platinum solitaires are the most popular these days,” Elsa began as DiNozzo stared down into the rows of rings, feeling as lost as he was pretending to be. He shook his head slowly.
“I don't think so,” he said. “I've only ever seen Ziva wearing gold jewelry.”
“Yellow gold or white gold?”
He blinked at the question, giving her what must be the familiar expression of a man who thought 'gold' meant 'yellow gold'. “Yellow,” he finally said. She nodded slightly.
“We don't sell as many of these as we used to,” she said, pulling a display of yellow gold solitaires from the display case and setting them on the counter. “Have you given much thought to size?”
“Oh,” he said. “I really don't know what her ring size would be.”
Elsa smiled politely. “I meant the size of the diamond.”
“Oh!” he replied before giving her an embarrassed smile. “Nothing too big.” His eyes widened slightly with the realization of how that sounded. “Not that she doesn't deserve something bigger, or I can't afford it-”
“It's more about what the woman would want to wear than what the man can afford,” Elsa interrupted. DiNozzo grinned.
“Exactly.”
“Well, we have these two here,” she said, pointing out two rings. “This one is three-quarters of a carat, and this one is a tiny bit over one carat.”
He pretended to study both for several minutes before shaking his head. “They're both nice,” he said finally, “but not really what I was thinking. With any luck, she'll have this for the rest of her life. I want it to be just right. Maybe somewhere else-”
“Actually, Mr. Dinallo, my father opened this store as a custom jewelry store almost sixty years ago,” Elsa interrupted. “He still does custom orders. You can pick out your stone and the setting yourself. That way, you can be sure to get exactly what you're looking for.”
“Really?” DiNozzo asked, brightening. “That sounds perfect.”
Elsa gave him another smile/grimace. “I believe my father is back in his workshop right now. If you don't mind waiting here for a moment, I'll ask if it's okay if I send you right back.” She returned the pillow of rings to the glass display counter and locked it before walking through a well-concealed door in the back of the store.
She returned a minute later with what he supposed was an encouraging smile. “He said that now is a good time,” she informed him. “Come around this way and I'll led you back.”
Saul Steiner was wearing almost comically-thick jeweler's glasses as he was sitting at a workbench, a small tray of loose diamonds in front of him. He didn't rise to greet DiNozzo, but wasn't being rude; the wheelchair he sat in was a pretty good indication that he couldn't.
Still, the octogenarian offered a withered yet steady hand to the younger man, who shook it confidently. “Welcome to my workshop, Mr. Dinallo,” Steiner rasped. “Please, have a seat. Let's talk.” As DiNozzo sat, he removed his jeweler's glasses and replaced them with a pair of bifocals that seemed almost as thick. “So I understand you're in the market for an engagement ring.”
“That's right,” DiNozzo replied with a nod. “And I understand you're the one to help me.”
Steiner guffawed a few times at that. “I like to think so,” he replied. “Have you given this much thought?”
“The ring, or getting married?” DiNozzo joked, earning him another round of laughter that left the old man slightly breathless.
“Ah, I hope your future wife appreciates a good sense of humor,” he managed after he caught his breath.
“She tolerates it. I think that's as much as I can ask for.”
Steiner smiled, his eyes appearing far away. “My wife, Tali, rest her soul, I think was the same way. She used to tell me that she wished she married someone half as funny as I thought I was.”
“Tali?” DiNozzo asked, surprised.
“Well, that is what I called her. It's short for Talitha. A good Hebrew name.” He frowned slightly. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“No, not at all,” DiNozzo said quickly. “It's just, my girlfriend, Ziva, she had a sister named Tali. I've never heard it anywhere else, that's all.”
“Ah,” Steiner replied. He studied the younger man for a few seconds. “You said she had a sister?”
“She died when she was sixteen. Hamas suicide bomber.” He paused, then added, probably unnecessarily, “Ziva's from Israel.”
Steiner tsked lightly as he shook his head. “My brother Ephraim, he tried to convince me to join him in Israel-of course, it was still Palestine then-after we left Germany, but I told him my place was in America, and two hours after I stepped off the boat, with only the shirt on my back and the name of a dead jeweler I apprenticed with as a reference, I walked into a jewelry store looking for a job and was greeted by the owner's daughter. Three months later, we were married.” He smiled at the memory and leaned back in his wheelchair.
“Tali,” DiNozzo said with a smile. Steiner nodded.
“She was also the one who told me that her father's business was failing, and instead of working for him, I should open my own store. Well, I did that, and sure enough, my father-in-law's store went out of business.” He leaned forward, as if sharing a secret. “I offered him a job, but the poor schmuck had too much pride to ever consider working for me.” He guffawed again before waving a hand dismissively. “But enough about that. You did not come here to hear an old man's stories about a time before you were born. You came about a ring. Let us get started.” He slid the tray of loose diamonds he had been studying over to DiNozzo. “These just came last week from Belgium. They have been independently marked and appraised. If I were in the business of selling rouge diamonds, I would have retired to Palm Springs with a woman half my age years ago.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Now, if your lady is from Israel, she knows diamonds, so I am only going to show you the very best that we have. If you do not find anything to your liking here, I have a few others I can show you.”
DiNozzo stared down into the tray, looking as lost as he felt. “I don't know what I'm looking for,” he admitted. Steiner chuckled again.
“Most people don't,” he said conspiratorially. “Let's start with size. Despite what the ladies claim, size really does matter.” He gave DiNozzo a large wink before using his tweezers to pluck one from the tray. “This is two carats.”
“That's a bit large,” DiNozzo said, shaking his head. “Ziva doesn't wear anything big and flashy. She's an officer in the IDF, so I want to get her something she could wear even when she's in uniform.”
“Ah, okay,” Steiner replied, replacing the diamond before glancing up sharply at DiNozzo, pointing at him with the tweezers. “I believe I have seen your Ziva. At the synagogue a few blocks away from here, no? Pretty young thing, dark curly hair?”
“That would be her,” DiNozzo confirmed with a grin.
“You are a lucky one, then, Mr. Dinallo. When I saw her a few weeks ago, I turned to my friend Bertie and asked who that gorgeous krasavitse was, and he told me I'd have to be fifty years younger to handle a woman like that.” He chuckled before grabbing another gem with his tweezers. “This one, I believe, is one point one carats. This is more of what you are looking for, no?”
“That seems about right,” DiNozzo nodded, studying the diamond at the end of Steiner's tweezers and trying to picture it in a ring. When he did that, he found himself picturing it on Ziva's hand, and had to struggled to suppress the urge to shake his head free of the image.
“That is what I figured,” Steiner agreed, still examining it. “Now, are you familiar with the grading of color and flaws of a diamond?”
“Slightly,” DiNozzo replied. Ziva had given him a lesson in it as they were studying Steiner's records. The old man nodded.
“This one is a G. It isn't quite colorless. It has a bit of a yellowish glint to it, which you have to be in the right light to see.”
“I think I want something completely colorless,” DiNozzo replied. To his surprise, Steiner shook his head slightly.
“As much as I want to help you take the most expensive stone out of my store, I am going to spare your wallet for a minute to talk about settings. Now, if you want yellow gold, even the most colorless diamond is going to reflect the color from the setting and give it a slight yellowish tint. You can save yourself a few thousand dollars if you go with a G or maybe even as high as an I.” He wagged a finger at DiNozzo and shook his head slightly. “Heaven help me, I must be getting soft in my old age, but I like you, young man, and you made me laugh, which is why I am helping you out here.”
“And I appreciate it,” DiNozzo joked. “As does my wallet.” And my director. “Yes, I was thinking about a yellow gold setting.”
“That is what I assumed, having seen your lovely lady. Not many women these days seem to like yellow gold engagement rings-everyone wants the white gold or the platinum, but your Ziva looked like a very classy type of woman, the kind of woman who wears real gold jewelry. So, are you going to be getting married in Israel?”
DiNozzo blinked at the non-sequitur before shaking his head slightly. “We haven't talked about it. Well, to be perfectly honest, we haven't talked about anything vaguely resembling marriage yet.”
“Ah,” Steiner said with understanding. “So you are preparing for the inevitable.”
DiNozzo flinched slightly at the word 'inevitable', but Steiner didn't seem to notice. “Something like that,” he said with a chuckle. “I think I need to figure out if I'm going to convert before we can make decisions about where we would be married.”
“Ah, you are not Jewish then?” Steiner asked with sudden interest. DiNozzo shook his head.
“I'm not much of anything,” he admitted, which was true. He vaguely remembered his mother saying something about baptizing him when he was a baby, but with the exception of a few Christmas Eve and Easter masses, he didn't have much of a connection with the Catholic church. “Ziva and I are involved in an adult education class that the Grossmans teach.”
“Ah, yes,” Steiner said, a trace of sadness in his voice. “My great-niece, Lena-Tali's brother's granddaughter-she was rather seriously dating a Gentile a couple of years ago. They were involved in that class. He was trying to convert so they could get married.” He shook his head sadly. “I was going to design her engagement ring, too. It was to be an exquisite piece, one of my best, but Scott-Lena's boyfriend-died of poisoning of all things before it was complete.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head again. “Such a shame, such a shame. But that's not important now,” he said, brightening again. “Back to your ring for your beautiful lady.”
Chapter 36
The sound of the piano stopped abruptly at the ringing of the doorbell of the Georgetown condo, much to Tony DiNozzo's regret. He had been standing in the hallway for almost five minutes listening to the music and wondering what he was going to say when the door opened.
Ziva had already turned and headed back toward the living room when the door finished swinging open. “Hello to you, too,” DiNozzo said jokingly.
“I have had a long day, Tony. If this is not related to the case, I am not interested in hearing about it right now.”
He paused for a moment before sliding the long thin box he was carrying onto the kitchen counter. “I brought pizza,” he finally offered. “I would have gotten flowers, but then I realized I didn't know what I would be apologizing for, so I figured this would be a better approach. Tastier, too. Besides, after spending literally the entire afternoon at a jewelry store, I didn't have the energy to handle the florist as well.”
Ziva sighed as she turned back to face her partner. “I am sorry, Tony. I have been rather bitchy the last few days.” She opened the pizza box and was faced with a cheese pizza. Entirely cheese, no pepperoni. She glanced up at Tony, an expression of confusion on her face. “You are not eating?”
“Why, are you so hungry you're eating that whole thing by yourself?”
“No, it is just...” She tilted the pizza toward him. “You do not like cheese pizza.”
He shrugged. “I figured after giving you a hard time on Saturday that maybe I should make more of an effort to eat something kosher.”
“You do not have to do that,” she replied, but he caught the ghost of a smile behind her words. She was halfway through her first slice of pizza before she spoke again. “You went to see Saul Steiner, then?”
“Yeah,” he replied after swallowing another mouthful of the bland pizza. If ever he forgot why he liked pepperoni, he could use that moment as a reminder. “Be careful around him. He may be old, but he's feisty. And I think he has a thing for girls with dark curly hair.” He took another bite of his pizza. “Actually, judging by half of the things he was saying, he has a thing for girls period.”
“Ah, so you have something in common.”
He grinned. “Only if you're referring to the dark curly hair comment.”
She rolled her eyes and looked away. “Idiot,” she muttered, but he could see her smile. “Did you learn anything other than his preference for female company?”
“He gave me a rather long lecture about diamond grading.”
Another eye roll. “About the case, Tony.”
“He seemed interested when I brought up the fact that I wasn't Jewish, but not overtly disapproving. In fact, after I mentioned the Grossman's class at the synagogue, he brought up Lena Rosen and Scott Daltron, and seemed pretty sad about that. Of course, he could have just been sad about not being able to complete the ring he and Daltron designed. He talked about that in great length.”
“Hmm,” Ziva said, her mouthful full of pizza. She swallowed and continued, “You may have been right when you said that Steiner's comments, if he makes any comments at all, were not done maliciously. Maybe he is just a gossipy old man.”
“He's definitely a gossipy old man. I can tell you stories about half of the pillars of the Jewish community of DC.”
She smiled thinly. “Any luck with the phones or email?”
“McGee hasn't contacted me with anything, so I don't think so. If he's going to talk, it'll be Saturday at the synagogue after services. Whoever we get to tail him is going to have to stay close enough to hear what he says.”
“Will that be McGee?”
He shook his head. “The daughter knows McGee from the court order, remember? What about Gibbs? Think you can get him in a kippah for a few hours of reconnaissance?” They both smiled at the mental image.
They switched to small talk for the duration of the dinner. Despite Tony's claims to not like cheese pizza, he ate seven slices to Ziva's three. It looked like he'd be getting up for the morning run the next day, regardless of where he was sleeping.
The thoughts of the sleeping arrangement caused the smile to drop from his face as he thought about sleeping alone the last few nights. “Are we going to talk about what's been bothering you for the last couple of days?” he asked. No use beating around the bush.
Her smile also fell instantly from her face. “It is not important,” she said stiffly.
“Your lips say no, but your eyes won't shut up,” he said, paraphrasing one of his first comments to her after their reunion from the summer apart. She shook her head, but he had already seen what he was looking for. Everyone else seemed to think that Ziva was the unfeeling, uncaring Mossad automaton that she often wanted them to think she was. Sometimes, Tony felt like he was the only person to see the real Ziva David, the one who regretted that she had grown up so fast, who mourned two dead siblings, who let her guard down when she played the piano or hummed while she cooked. There was a vulnerability there, an uncertainty, and sometimes, he wondered if she was able to see that in herself.
And as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. “No, Tony, I do not want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do,” he replied. He knew bullying a trained assassin with four-five? he wasn't sure if she had rearranged the weaponry in the last couple of days-loaded guns seconds away wasn't the brightest idea, but he was fairly certain she wouldn't hurt him. At least, that's what he was hoping. “You've been avoiding me since Gibbs assigned me to check out engagement rings,” he pointed out before putting on a falsely chipper smile. “It's just for the mission, Ziva. We don't really have to marry me.”
“You are relieved by that, no?” she asked bitingly, and his smile dropped.
“What are you saying, Ziva? Marriage? We both know that we'd both need years of intensive therapy to bring either of us to that point,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. When that fell through, he changed tactics. “What do you think this is for me, just another mission? I wouldn't be here eating cheese pizza and trying to remember if I have clean running socks in your apartment if that were true.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I want to be here,” he said emphatically. She shook her head slightly, but he wasn't sure if it was in denial of his statement or for some other reason. She rose from the barstool she had been sitting on and began pacing the area between the kitchen and dining room.
“I had not been in Mossad long when Tali was killed,” she finally said. “I was still in my training period, but I came home anyway. We were supposed to be mourning, but my father and I still completed my training exercises while I was home, when my mother was not around to see what we were doing. After my month of mourning was complete, I left and began to seek vengeance.”
“An eye for an eye,” he commented. She shook her head.
“I did not go after their teenagers, as they went after ours,” she said bitterly. “I spent a year infiltrating Hamas and removing those with direct links to Tali's murder. I would have continued, to strike their very center, but my father pulled me out. He said I was done, that it was over, that I had killed those who killed my sister, and to stay in longer would only lead to my own death. He said I was no longer objective and it was time to go home.” Her father's words, spoken to her a decade ago, seemed to echo with the words spoken by Tony in her dream much more recently.
“I was not supposed to be Metsada,” she continued, her eyes focused on a memory far away. “When I was recruited for Mossad, it was to be in Intelligence, as my father had been, but an instructor took an interest in my talents and transferred me to Operations. Had he not done that, I never would have gone after Hamas after Tali's death.”
“You wouldn't be the person you are now.”
“No, I would not,” she agreed. “But I sometimes wonder if I would have been a better person than I am now.”
“There's nothing wrong with you, Ziva.”
She smiled thinly to acknowledge the comment before continuing. “When I had left home after Tali's death, my parents were still in mourning. A sibling is expected to mourn for a month; a parent, for a year. When my father had called me home after my year with Hamas, I discovered that my mother had left Israel and returned to Russia, where she was born and still had family. She claimed otherwise, but I knew that Tali had always been her favorite-her 'little Natalia' was what she always called her-and after Tali's death, she found that she could not bring herself to stay. Of our family, Tali was the best of us, and when she was gone, there was nothing left. My mother needed someone to blame for that, and as she could not put a face to the man that killed Tali, she began to blame my father. She blamed him for not doing enough to prevent that attack, she blamed him for almost three decades of putting his career before his family.” She took a deep breath and added, “She blamed him for taking her one remaining child and making me like him. She left because she could no longer deal with being married to a Mossad officer and could not face the fact that she helped to raise another.” She didn't add what she was thinking, that in the ten years since her parents divorced and her mother moved to Russia, that she had only seen her twice, and once was during an anti-terrorism operation in Eastern Europe. She had taken a week-long break from the mission without a word as to her destination to Jen Shepard and caught the first train to Moscow. After only two days, the guilt that they both felt about the past was almost too oppressive for either to handle. “At first, I was angry with her for leaving, but gradually, I began to understand why she did it. It is not easy to live with a Mossad officer.”
And Tony knew that that was what this was about. He rose from the barstool where he had been silently listening and stopped his partner in her pacing, wrapping his arms around her tightly. She didn't return the gesture, but neither did she pull away. They continued to stand there for an unknown length of time. “If you're trying to scare me away, you're going to have to do better than that,” he finally said, his words somewhere between joking and serious, “because I'm not going anywhere.”