By the Rivers of Babylon (37 page)

Burg swiveled around in the flight engineer’s seat and crossed his legs as he drew on his pipe. “If I were a paranoiac I think I would be so filled with desire for revenge that I’d lead those poor bastards back up the hill.”

“But would they
follow
?” asked Becker.

“That’s what we were trying to resolve before,” said Hausner. “I think Rish will convince them that we are through. He can do that. He has a prisoner now, and no matter what she says about us, Rish will translate it to fit his own needs.”

There was a long silence in the cockpit. Each man conjured up his own image of Deborah Gideon at the mercy of Ahmed Rish—naked, brutalized, broken, alone . . . dying. Hausner hoped that she would save herself a lot of pain and tell them everything she knew. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t worth the torture to keep it secret. But he feared they might torture her anyway, just for the pleasure of it. He found it hard to work up anger for Rish, just pity for the girl. Anger at Rish would have been the purest type of hypocrisy, as Muhammad Assad would attest to.

Becker rolled a cigarette from some of Burg’s pipe tobacco and weather-map paper. He cleared his throat and broke the silence. “How are the odds now?”

Hausner knew that Becker was discreet. “The same, really.” He seemed to be thinking out loud. “We have almost thirty guns but no more ammunition per gun than before—about a hundred rounds apiece, I think. Our defenses are in a shambles, and we don’t have the water or energy to rebuild them. We’ve shot all our ruses and they won’t be fooled by the same ones twice. Brin is dead, and the scope may be at the end of its life, too. Anyway, there are only ten rounds left for the M-14. I have two men trying to adapt the scope to an AK-47.” He took another long pull from the wine bottle and swallowed it before it ran over his tongue. “By the way, how is the kerosene holding out?”

Becker smiled. “It’s hard to believe that the instruments were that inaccurate. I don’t know where the stuff is coming from.”

Hausner nodded. “Don’t let the rabbi know, or we’ll get a sermon on the miracle of the holy oil. Anyway, we are completely out of containers and almost every Molotov cocktail is gone.” He finished the wine and let the bottle drop to the deck. “But you asked about the odds. The odds are still dependent on the Ashbals. We still are not the odds-makers here. We can only wait for their next move.” He looked down at the portfolio in his lap. He stared at a picture of Rish. “Ahmed,” he said softly, “if you had an ounce of sanity, you would get the hell out of Babylon before it becomes your grave. But of course you won’t.”

Teddy Laskov looked down at Rish’s picture. “Speak to me, Ahmed.”

Itzhak Talman sipped on a glass of port and flipped through his own portfolio of Rish. “Why haven’t we heard from him yet? What does he want?”

Michel’s was noisy and crowded, and almost every conversation had to do with the peace mission. It seemed unpatriotic to speak of anything else. Everyone in the café recognized the two ex-Hel Avir generals, but no one stared at them or made them uncomfortable.

Laskov sipped a vodka. “I don’t believe he has them under his control. If they were captives, then we would have heard from Rish.”

“If they are not captive, then they are dead, Teddy.”

Laskov leaned across the table, spilling the vodka from his glass. “Alive! I know it. I feel it.”

“Captive where, then?”

“Babylon.” The word surprised him as much as it did
Talman. Perhaps it was because they had been using the Hebrew word,
shrym—
“taken captive”—instead of an expression like “held hostage” or “held prisoner.” The association of words was inevitable. Perhaps the vodka helped. Or perhaps it was more than just an association of words mixed with alcohol. “Babylon,” Laskov repeated and felt it was so. “Babylon,” he said again, standing up and overturning his chair. “Babylon!” he shouted, and heads turned toward him. Talman took his arm, but Laskov pulled away. He stuffed his papers into his case and ran into the street, leaving Talman to throw a handful of pound notes on the table.

Outside, Talman jumped into a cab alongside Laskov, just as it began moving.

“Jerusalem!” Laskov shouted to the driver. “National emergency!”

Talman pulled the door closed as the driver, who was not unfamiliar with breaking the speed laws when someone yelled “national emergency,” accelerated across St. George Square and turned onto the Jerusalem road.

“Babylon,” said Laskov, more quietly this time.

The driver glanced over his shoulder, then watched his passengers’ faces in his mirror.

“Babylon,” said Talman with not as much conviction. “Yes. Maybe. Babylon.”

“Babylon,” said Jacob Hausner. He stared at Rish’s psychological profile. “Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins.” He had read that somewhere. Hausner had found Kahn’s half-bottle ration of wine and picked it up from the floor. “Nice. Appropriate.” He took a long drink from the bottle but could not stomach it any longer and spit it out. “If I ever get back to Haifa, I’m going to devote my energies and wide-ranging talents to the development of a good local wine.”

Becker was unimpressed with both Hausner’s erudition and his plans for the future. “What really galls me,” he said, “is that we have to wait here for this lunatic. We are not the odds-makers.”

“Perhaps we should be,” said Hausner. “Perhaps it’s time
we
went on the offensive.”

Burg caught a danger signal. He sat up. “Meaning?”

Hausner stretched out in the jump seat. “They’re probably
back at their bivouac around the Ishtar Gate by now. If they are going to attack again at moonset, they will first come back here and assemble at a staging area, a jump-off point, some distance from the base of the slope. That’s military procedure. The most distinguishable landmark for that purpose would be the city wall. We can place an ambush there. About ten or fifteen men should do it.”

Burg shook his head. “For God’s sake, Hausner, don’t start thinking you’re a general. It’s all we can do to hold them off from up here. We can’t send anyone out of this perimeter. If the ambush party didn’t find them, then we’d be ten or fifteen men and guns short when the attack began.”

“Then the ambush party could attack from the rear,” said Hausner. “Or attack their bivouac, kill their wounded and the orderlies, smash their communications equipment, burn their stores, and maybe even rescue Deborah Gideon.”

Burg stared over his glowing pipe for a few seconds. “Who are you, Hausner . . . Attila the Hun or head of El Al Security? Kill their wounded—burn their stores—have you gone mad? Stay out of the moonlight.”

Becker spoke. “He’s been mad at least as long as I’ve been with El Al,” he said, not altogether jokingly.

“We have to
do
something,” said Hausner. “The least we could do is send a party down the west slope for water.”

Burg shook his head again. “If there is even one Ashbal left there, that water party will never make it. That slope—wall, really—is suicide. We can find plenty of volunteers to go, I’m sure, but I really have to object to sending anyone outside of this perimeter again. And that includes, I’m afraid, observation posts. That was a massacre.” Burg felt more confident in his ability to lead men now. Also, Hausner had abandoned him, in a way, and he felt that his position was stronger because of it. The people had seen him on the hill as the commander, and he rather enjoyed the sensation. He was not satisfied with being non-committal any longer. He could butt heads with Hausner, and Hausner would have to listen to his point of view. “A tight defense. No excursions. The water will have to last. No OP’s. We pull in like a turtle in a shell and hang on until someone realizes that we are here.”

Hausner rose from the jump seat. He stared at Burg for a long time. “You know, I thought that converting our pacifists to dedicated killers was a miracle. The bigger miracle, I see, was
transforming Isaac Burg from a shadowy, wispy, translucent little intelligence man into a man of substance. Flesh and blood. Opinions, even. Field Marshal von Burg. So you liked it, did you? It’s nice to be king of the hill, master of your own fate, and to hold so many other fates in your hands. If you had made a mistake tonight you wouldn’t be any more dead than if I’d made the mistake. But if you win—ah—that’s the thing, Isaac. If you win, they’ll parade you through the Jaffa Gate like a Roman emperor.”

Burg stood up. “That’s a lot of shit. I just think you could use some input here. My God, Hausner, don’t you want help?”

Becker turned back to his log book and busied himself with it.

“The only help I can accept,” said Hausner, “is from competent military people. That would be Dobkin. Not you.” He lowered his voice. “I like you, Isaac, but don’t get in my way.”

“I’m in your way whether you like it or not. And I mean to have a say in the decision-making process around here.” His pipe twitched in his mouth.

Hausner could see that he meant it. He suddenly laughed. “You bastard!” He moved toward the cockpit door. “All right, then, as long as you want it badly enough to stand up for it, it’s yours. Welcome to the top of the pyramid. If I jump off, you’re alone again.” He laughed as he walked through the cabin, out the emergency door, and onto the wing. He shouted back into the aircraft. “You poor bastard!”

Benjamin Dobkin looked up into the faces of six or seven Arabs who were all bent over staring down at him. One of them bent further and shook Dobkin’s shoulder. They were speaking to him in broken Arabic. Why should Arabs speak in broken Arabic?

He remembered crawling along the river bank, passing out, and crawling again. He had no idea of how much time had gone by since he left the perimeter. The moon was high and it was cold. He moved his hand slowly so as not to alarm them. He reached into his pocket and felt for the digitalis. It was gone.

One of the Arabs dangled the plastic bag containing the pills in front of his face. He grabbed for it, but the man pulled it away. The man said, in bad Arabic, “Medicine? Need?”

“Yes,” said Dobkin. “Medicine. Need.”

This caused some mumbling. Another man bent over and held something up to his face. “Pazuzu. Evil.”

Dobkin stared at the blurry demon a few inches from his eyes. In the moonlight, the feral grin seemed wet and obscene. He supposed that having that with him was not going to get him on the right side of these Moslems. He said the Arabic word for archeologist, but they seemed not to be listening. The man dropped the demon on the ground and turned away.

They began talking among themselves now. It was with a slow realization that Dobkin recognized that they were using Hebrew words mixed with their strange Arabic.

He thrust his hand into his shirt and felt for the star. It was still there. He pulled it out and held it up by its chain. It gleamed in the cold, blue moonlight. “Shema Yisroel Adonoi Elohenu Adonoi Echod.”

The effect was as if he had dropped out of the sky in a space suit—which in a way he had. The men stopped talking to one another and looked down at him wide-eyed.

He spoke in slow Hebrew, sticking to the classical words that he knew they would recognize from the Scriptures. “I am Benjamin Dobkin,
Aluf”—
he used the ancient Hebrew word for general—“
Aluf
of the Israelites. I came with the—” They would not understand that Hebrew construction, so he used the Arabic word for aircraft. “I need help. The Jews on the hill—in Babylon—need your help. Will you help?”

The oldest among them knelt beside him. He was what Dobkin would have expected of a Babylonian Jew—swarthy, white-bearded, dark-eyed, and dressed in a flowing robe that was not quite a
gellebiah.
“Of course we will help an
Aluf
of the Israelites. We are kin,” he added.

“Yes,” said Dobkin. “You have not forgotten Jerusalem.”

Hausner walked the perimeter again and again. He was alone. He was tired, thirsty, hungry, and in pain from a dozen cuts and bruises. His ear was mangled from the bullet and felt as if it were on fire. The wine was whirling around his head, and he felt nauseous.

He stared up at the stars, then down at the moonlit landscape. There was something compelling about those expanses of blue-white terrain. He was sick to death of the hilltop, the big broken Concorde sitting with its torn tail, mocking his tragic error. He was sick of the people, the smells, the closeness of everyone and everything. He was suffering from what so many men in fortresses suffer from—claustrophobia mixed with contempt, born of familiarity, for everyone around
him. Yet he had been there only a little more than twenty-four hours. But in his mind he had been there forever. The hilltop was big enough, physically. The people made it small. Their eyes followed him wherever he went.

He came around to the west side and looked out at the endless mud flats. He threw his hands into the air. “God, I want to go home! I am tired and I want to go home!” He thought of the famous question, “Why me, God?” and the sardonic answer, “Why not?” He laughed and shouted, “Yes, why not? Jacob Hausner is as good as anyone else to bully around! Thanks, God! I’ll remember this!”

He laughed again, then broke into soft sobs and sank to the warm earth. Through his tears he could see the domes, spires, and towers of Jerusalem suffused with the warm golden glow of sunset. He was standing on the heights above the town, and lambs were being shepherded home by young boys outside the walls of the Old City. It was Passover and Easter Sunday as well, and the city was filled with people. Then, suddenly, he was home in Haifa on the terrace of his father’s villa, overlooking the blue bay. It was autumn now—Succoth, the thanksgiving festival. His father’s house was decked with harvest decorations and the tables were laden with food. He was a young man about to leave home for the war—to work with British Intelligence. Life was good. It always was. The war was great fun. Lots of girls. There was one who looked like Miriam, he remembered. Miriam. Miriam was a child then. While she and her family were being herded around naked by the Nazis, he was sitting in his father’s house in Haifa reading German philosophers. Or he was playing war between leaves. That wasn’t his fault, of course, but it was a fact. For every victim there is a wife, a husband, a son, a daughter, a friend, or a lover who lives.