Vicious Circle (10 page)

“Lean on her again,” Elihu advised. “This time don’t wear kid gloves. As the British say, maybe she can help us with our inquiries.”

M
AALI, WHO DID TWELVE HOURS OF VOLUNTEER WORK A WEEK
in a neighborhood Red Crescent clinic, checked with the woman behind the reception desk to see when her next stint was scheduled.
Still wearing the white ankle-length apron over her long robe, she covered her head with a shawl and, pushing through the
heavy door of the building in East Jerusalem, made her way to the back of the lot where her scooter was chained to a fence
post. Standing on the starter, she kicked over the motor and pulled out into the traffic choking Nablus Road. She had blackmailed
her father into buying her the Italian scooter four years before by threatening to run off with a Syrian, something she never
had the slightest intention of doing, but then all was fair when it came to wrangling things out of her father. Since then
she had met and married Yussuf and, inspired by her husband’s example, turned deeply religious. She was ashamed of many of
her teenage escapades—she had played the role of the spoiled princess to the hilt—but she never regretted the scooter, which
allowed her to move freely about the city she loved, studying the Qur’an in a mosque one day, doing volunteer work for the
Red Crescent the next, from time to time meeting Yussuf in the homes of trusted friends.

Halfway down Nablus road the traffic slowed to a crawl because of an accident, so Maali turned onto Amer Ibn El-Atz, which
was being repaved and was closed to automobiles. Riding on the sidewalk, she could make out the fire-ball reflection of the
midday sun in a high window up ahead; for a moment she thought the building was
actually on fire. Near the corner where Amer Ibn El-Atz crossed Salah El Din, a BMW motorcycle with two men on it overtook
the scooter and, veering sharply, forced it into a narrow driveway. Furious, Maali was about to shout an insult she had picked
up from her younger brother, something impugning the driver’s masculinity, when a bear of a man wearing a leather motorcycle
helmet and goggles leaped on her. Before she could cry out he pinned her to the ground and, tugging free her shawl, pressed
a sweet-smelling handkerchief over her mouth and nose.

Maali came to in the back of a small delivery van filled with burlap sacks of pistachio nuts. In the dirty light filtering
through the two small windows in the back doors, she could see the man with the leather helmet and goggles sitting across
from her, his legs stretched straight out, his spine against the side of the truck, calmly breaking open nuts and popping
them in his mouth. She couldn’t make out whether he was a Palestinian or a Jew. When he offered her a fist full of pistachios
she turned her head away. “Your mother is a whore,” she muttered in Arabic, hoping to identify her abductor from his response,
but he only laughed under his breath.

Suddenly she remembered the ring Yussuf had taken from the dead Jew named Erasmus Hall. Wriggling into a sitting position,
she hid her hands behind her back and tried to work it off, but she couldn’t force it past the joint.

She was still struggling to remove the ring when, twenty minutes later, the delivery van bounced over what felt like railroad
tracks, climbed a ramp and reversed up to a loading port. The engine was cut. The man in the motorcycle helmet held out a
blindfold and motioned for Maali to put it on and knot it. “I categorically refuse,” she said, raising her chin as she twisted
the ring around so that the stone was on the palm side of her hand.

Speaking perfect Arabic, the man said so quietly that she shivered: “If you don’t do it, I will.”

Maali knotted the blindfold. The man reached over and adjusted it, then rapped twice on the side of the van. Maali could hear
the back doors being thrown open. Strong hands reached in and pulled her from the van. With someone gripping each elbow, she
was led up
stone steps and through a door, then up a long flight of metal steps and into a warm room, where she was shoved up against
a wall. “Remove the blindfold,” a voice ordered in Arabic.

She tugged the blindfold down around her neck and immediately understood why the room seemed so warm; she was almost blinded
by a bank of blazing spot lights trained directly on her. She could hear the soft buzz of whispering coming from shadowy figures
in the back of the room. Then a man said, again in Arabic, “Yes, I’m absolutely sure she is the one I saw.”

Two muscular women in blue jeans and turtleneck sweaters started to push Maali toward the door. As she was being led away,
someone carelessly turned off the spotlights before she was out of the room. A man cursed in Hebrew and one of the women jerked
the blindfold up over her eyes, but it was too late; over her shoulder Maali had caught a glimpse of a stooped Arab hastily
pulling his
kiffiyeh
up to cover his face. She could have sworn the man looked familiar—and then it came to her. Of course! It was Mr. Hajji,
who had changed her Egyptian pounds into Israeli shekels at the Damascus Gate after her trip to Cairo.

Maali was hustled down a long corridor. She could hear metal doors clanging shut behind her and the voices of women whispering
encouragement in Arabic from cells along the way. She was pushed through a door and instructed to remove the blindfold. Blinking,
she found herself in a small, whitewashed room with a stainless steel table against a wall. One of the guards issued instructions
in Hebrew, a language Maali understood but refused to speak. The prisoner was to strip to the skin. When Maali didn’t move,
the woman arched her penciled brows. “What are you ashamed of?” she asked.

Maali had heard stories of how the Isra’ili police systematically humiliated their prisoners before they questioned them.
She was determined to remain calm. “Am I arrested?” she asked, but instead of answering, her jailers once again gestured for
her to disrobe.

A fat woman wearing white trousers and the white jacket of a medical worker entered the room. “You must do as they tell you,”
she said in Arabic. “If you don’t take off your clothing, they will summon the men and instruct them to do it for you.”

Moving deliberately, Maali removed her garments and folded them one by one on the metal table until she finally stood naked
in the middle of the room, with her right hand covering the ring on her left hand and her left hand covering her pubic hair.
The woman pulled on a rubber glove and dipped her forefinger into a small jar filled with Vaseline. Then she motioned for
the prisoner to bend over and grip her ankles. Tears spilled from Maali’s eyes as the two women jailers folded her over like
a sheaf of paper. She sucked in air as the medical worker roughly probed her vagina and then her anus. Straightening, she
snatched a formless gray shift flung at her by one of the guards and hastily pulled it over her head. The medical worker came
around with a small cardboard box and pointed at the prisoner’s silver earrings. Maali took them off and dropped them into
the box. The woman nodded at the gold locket around the girl’s neck and the rings on her hands. Maali’s heart sank as she
worked her engagement ring, and then her wedding band, off her fingers and added them to the box. The woman pointed at the
gold-colored ring on Maali’s fourth finger. Maali made a half-hearted attempt to remove it, and then shrugged. “It’s too tight,”
she said.

“Rules are rules,” the woman said. She spread some Vaseline on the finger and worked the ring back and forth until it came
free. She was about to drop it into the box when she noticed writing on the inside. Holding the ring up to the light, she
sounded out the word. “E-ras-mus Hall.” She looked at Maali. “This is a strange ring for an Arab woman to be wearing. Where
did you get it?”

A
S THE SUN BURNED ITS WAY THROUGH LOW CLOUDS INTO THE
Judean Hills, the recorded sing-song message summoning the faithful to the fourth prayer of the day echoed from the minaret
of the El Omariye Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. “
Allahu Akbar
,
Allahu Akbar
,” cried the
muezzin
. “Come to prayer, come to prayer. Come to prosperity, come to prosperity. God is most great, God is most great. There is
no god but Allah.” In the safe-house off Christian Quarter Road, only accessible by a maze of alleys and staircases and rooftop
passageways, the Doctor prostrated himself before the
mihrab
, the niche cut into the wall to indicate the direction of the Kaaba built by the Messenger Ibrahim at the heart of the holy
city of Mecca. Drumming his bruised forehead against the cracked Moorish floor tiles, savoring the pain, he recited the opening
verse of the Qur’an: “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Praise belongs to God, Lord of all Being, the All-merciful,
the All-compassionate, the Master of the Day of Doom. Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succor. Guide us in the
straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast blessed.”

Next to the door reinforced with steel plating, the young Bedouin woman known as Petra sat before a green Israeli field radio,
monitoring military and police wavelengths through headphones. She was wearing blue jeans under her embroidered Bedouin robe.
A kerchief was thrown loosely over her short hair. Two AK-47s, along with several gas masks and a carton filled with loaded
clips and hand grenades, were within arm’s reach. Across the room, a large British
Mandate map of Palestine, with place names in Arabic, was taped to the wall over a bricked-in window. On the kitchen table
that doubled as a desk, glass paperweights with snow scenes from Switzerland weighed down stacks of newspaper clippings and
messages.

Seeing that the Doctor had almost finished his prayers, Petra, who spoke Hebrew like a native Israeli and had been disguised
as a
Haredi
when the Rabbi’s convoy was flagged down near the Zohar Reservoir, removed the headset, which pinched her ears, and set out
a pot of sweet tea and honey cakes on a low table to mark the end of the day’s Ramadan fast. Settling cross-legged onto a
Bedouin cushion before the low table, the Doctor poured himself a steaming cup of tea and blew noisily across the surface
to cool it. Leaning over the table, cupping his hand to collect the crumbs, he nibbled on one of the cakes and swallowed an
amphetamine capsule with his first gulp of tea. Across the room, in front of the
mihrab
, Yussuf Abu Saleh sank to his knees and began the evening’s recitation of the Qur’an; each night of Ramadan he read aloud
a thirtieth of the holy book in order to finish on the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast that marked the end of the holy month.
“
God knows well your enemies
,” he intoned.

Some of the Jews pervert words from their meaning … twisting with their tongues and traducing religion. If they had said,
“We have heard and obey” … it would have been better for them, and more upright; but God has cursed them for their unbelief
…

Finishing his break-fast, the Doctor walked over to the laundry sink in the corner. Letting the water run, he removed his
jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his robe and carefully scrubbed both of his hands and wrists and forearms to the elbows
with soap and a brush, then raised his hands above his head and shook them dry. Slipping back into his jacket, he nodded to
Petra, who came over and turned the faucet off for him.

Pushing open the thick reinforced door with the soft toe of his shoe, leaving the door ajar behind him, the Doctor made his
way into a rectangular room illuminated day and night by a single 150-watt
bulb suspended from a braided electric cord. The two armed guards, the el-Tel brothers, Azziz and Aown—one lounged on an Army
cot under a bricked-in window while the other straddled a kitchen chair back-to-front and surveyed the prisoners—saluted the
Doctor with grins; the youngest of the two, Azziz, leaped to his feet and spun the chair around so that the Doctor could sit
on it in the normal way.

Picking at a crumb lodged between two teeth, the Doctor sat down on the kitchen chair, removed his thick wire-rimmed spectacles
and meticulously cleaned the lenses with the hem of his long robe. His eyes, as usual, were bloodshot and swollen from fatigue.
For the Doctor, there were not enough hours in the day, or days in a lifetime, which is why he kept himself awake with amphetamines.
Replacing his spectacles, squinting through them to bring objects into focus, he studied the two prisoners, their heads covered
with thick leather hoods, sleeping in the heavy wooden chairs set away from the wall with the Palestinian flag and the Ghazeh
Central Import-Export Bank calendar. The short-sleeved shirt, the calendar had been Yussuf’s bright idea: if you dropped enough
hints that the Rabbi was being held prisoner in Ghazeh, so he had reasoned, the Jews would eventually conclude that we were
trying to convince them he
wasn’t
in Ghazeh and decide that he was. Yussuf’s ruse seemed to have thrown the Isra’ilis off the scent; the public declarations
on Isra’ili television and radio, as well as private intelligence reports reaching the Doctor from Ghazeh, indicated that
the Jews were convinced the missing men were somewhere in the Strip. And Petra, monitoring the Isra’ili wavelengths, could
detect no unusual police or Army activity in the Jerusalem area.

The ankles of both prisoners were lashed to the thick legs of the chairs, their wrists handcuffed in front of them. The younger
of the two Jews slumped in his seat, his breath coming in frightened rasps. Rabbi Apfulbaum sat erect, his chin nodding onto
his chest and jerking back up under the hood.

The Doctor leaned forward and pulled the hood from the Rabbi’s head. Then, striking a wooden match, he held the flame to the
tip of a rough Palestinian Farid and dragged on the cigarette in short, agitated puffs, as if he was smoking for the first
time in his life.
Defying gravity, the ash grew longer than the cigarette until it finally broke off and drifted down onto the lapels of his
double-breasted suit jacket. The Doctor, staring intently at his prisoner, didn’t appear to notice the ashes. The foul-smelling
smoke must have irritated the Rabbi, because he leaned away and, raising his manacled wrists, waved the back of one hand to
dispel it. “In America,” he remarked in Arabic, his eyes straining to make out his captor, “they print on the packs that cigarette
smoking is hazardous for your health.”