Vicious Circle (29 page)

An eyelid twitched, a vein in his neck throbbed as he waited for the answer.

T
WO TEENAGE BOYS, VETERANS OF THE
intifada
, ONE WITH HIS wrist in a cast covered with Islamic slogans, were rummaging on a mountain of rubbish at the edge of the sprawling
Jabaliya refugee camp outside Gaza City before morning prayers when they spotted a black Reebok jutting from the trunk compartment
of a burnt-out taxi. Coming closer, they saw that the sneaker was practically new and still attached to a human foot. They
exchanged greedy glances as they pried open the warped door of the trunk. Inside, the rigid body of a religious Jew—he was
wearing rumpled black trousers and a filthy white shirt, and still had the ritual fringed
tzitzit
protruding from under his black suit jacket—was folded into the small space. A leather hood covered the corpse’s head. One
of the boys reached into the trunk and stuck his pinky through the small hole in the leather hood roughly behind where the
dead man’s ear should have been. He jerked out his finger as if he had been burned and held it up for the other boy to see.
His finger nail was covered with a sticky reddish-brown substance. Quickly, the boys unlaced the Reebok sneakers and worked
them off the dead man’s feet. Scrambling over broken furniture and burnt tires, they raced off with their prize just as half
a dozen Palestinian police cars, their sirens screaming, their lights flashing, came tearing down the unpaved road and screeched
to a stop at the foot of the mountain of rubbish.

An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

W
here did we leave off? Ah, yes, my tête-à-tête with the Israeli Prime Minister
.

Five minutes into our conversation I was ready to believe something I recently read in the newspapers, namely that a homo
sapiens only has twice as many genes as a fly or a worm. Nobody denies that the Prime Minister has good reason to be outraged;
the murder of the Rabbi’s secretary, the discovery of his body on a heap of garbage in Gaza, would test the patience, not
to mention the mettle, of any political leader. (Between you, me and the wall, I still wonder how much of his notorious anger
is genuine and how much is put on, like theatrical makeup before the curtain rises, in order to give him greater freedom of
action or, in this case, reaction.)

“How many Jews must be murdered before you Americans decide that reprisals are justified?” he asked rhetorically. (I’ve come
to realize, over the months I’ve been dealing with the Prime Minister, that most of his questions didn’t require answers;
they only require listening to.) “On your advice, Zachary, I sat on my hands when we buried the four bodyguards. And now we
will bury a Rabbinical student whose only crime was to serve as a secretary to Rabbi Apfulbaum. And in a few days we will
surely bury the Rabbi. And you will come on the long distance telephone line—my God, your phone bill alone would probably
pay our Mossad’s annual budget—and tell me the American President and the American people expect us to show restraint. Show
restraint! You remind me of the diplomat who advised the Jews being shipped to Auschwitz not to do anything that might make
the Germans angry.”

I’ve noticed that conversations with Israelis almost always come back, at some point, to the Holocaust; you don’t understand
anything about the Jews if you don’t grasp that, under stress, it is the psychological point of departure for their emotions.
It’s no coincidence that every foreign visitor to Israel—here I am speaking from personal experience—is hauled off to visit
Yad Vashem, their Holocaust museum, before they get to spend quality time with the political leaders. You put on a skull cap
and stand with your eyes closed in the building where a voice is reading out the names, one by one, of the million and a half
Jewish children who perished during the war. Sarah Goldstein, aged six, Vilnius, 1941. Israel Katz, aged four, Prague, 1944.
They soften you up with guilt before they talk to you. And it always works. How can you be hard on a people who have suffered
the way the Jews have?

The answer is detachment: I can be hard on them when it’s necessary because I force myself to be detached—from their history,
their fears, the plight, their problems
.

Not that I’d do things differently if I were in their shoes. Even when there is no shooting, the Israelis are at war: with
the Arabs, with themselves. And all is fair in love and war. Everyone plays the cards that are dealt to them
.

Including me
.

Which is why I told the Prime Minister not to worry about our phone bill. Which is why I told him the retaliation he proposed
wouldn’t be against the criminals who had abducted and murdered the secretary, but against innocent civilians. Which is why
I added that arbitrarily killing a reasonable number of Palestinians wouldn’t save the life of the Rabbi. The only way to
save the life of the Rabbi was to give in to the kidnapper’s demands or find the kidnappee before they killed him
.

I must have touched a nerve because the Prime Minister didn’t say anything for so long I thought I’d lost the secure connection.
“Are you still there?” I finally asked
.

“Never,” he said
.

“Never, what?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea what he was talking about
.

“We will never give in to their demands. Even you don’t have enough leverage on Israel to make us do that.”

“I wouldn’t make the mistake of asking you to do that.”

The Prime Minister only grunted
.

“Which narrows the choices available to you down to one: find the Rabbi before they kill him.”

“Believe me, we’re trying.”

I’d reached the heart of the matter. “If you don’t find him, if they kill him, if his body turns up in a garbage dump the
day before the Mt. Washington peace treaty is due to be signed—”

I could hear the Prime Minister breathing heavily into the phone. “What does the President of the United States expect us
to do?” he inquired, and I could detect, as I was meant to, the sarcasm in his voice
.

“Roll with the punch, Mr. Prime Minister. Take the heat. Fly to Washington. Sign the treaty. Shake the hand of Arafat’s successor
the way Rabin shook the hand of Arafat. You can hesitate to show how reluctant you are, but then reach out and grasp his hand
and shake it. And together we will try to get him and the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian police to bring this Abu
Bakr to justice. Maybe you can save your people, not to mention the Palestinians, from another Intifada. And maybe, just maybe,
you can find, amid all this religious clutter and territorial confusion, a small island of common ground. And on it you and
the Palestinians can together construct an edifice of peace. On it you can make history—”

“History,” the Prime Minister shot back, “is fiction. Robespierre said that before the blade of the guillotine cut into his
neck.” He cleared his throat in precisely the same way the Palestinian Authority Chairman cleared his throat and for an instant
I lost track of whom I was talking to. Then the Prime Minister sighed and I could hear the pain in his voice—real pain, as
opposed to staged anger—as he said, “Alright. We will stand down and stick our necks out once again.”

“I owe you an apology,” I said
.

“For what?”

“For thinking you had only twice as many genes as a fly or a worm.”

I
N THE APARTMENT ABOVE THE SEAFOOD RESTAURANT ON THE Jaffa shore, the
katza
, leaner and hungrier and crabbier than usual, haunted the communications alcove, hovering over the barefoot contessa as she
pecked away with two fingers on the computer keyboard, deciphering the coded reports pouring in from Aza. Some two dozen Israeli
technicians, armed with small black boxes crystal-tuned to a single ultra high frequency, were systematically crisscrossing
the Strip in unmarked cars driven by Palestinian Authority detectives. At precisely eighteen minutes to and eighteen minutes
past the hour, they listened—after which the reports began to filter in. Mobile units 17 through 20 in Khan Yunis, Aza’s second
largest city, reported in first: no joy. Mobile units 21 through 24 in Rafa came through next: no joy. Mobile units 1 through
10 in Aza City: no joy. Mobile units 11 through 15 on the coast road: no joy.

“What’s that?” Elihu demanded as the barefoot contessa typed out the random five-letter groups coming in from mobile unit
16. The deciphered message appeared on the screen: “C-o-n-t-a-c-t o-b-t-a-i-n-e-d” it read, “c-o-o-r-d-i-n-a-t-e-s a-l-e-f
d-a-l-e-t.” The message broke off.

Elihu, his nerves raw, snapped, “What’s going on?”

“How would I know?” the barefoot contessa asked defensively.

Gnawing on the stem of his unlit pipe, Elihu prowled back and forth behind her as she filed away at a hang nail. The screen
lit up again with random five-letter groups beamed down to the antennas on the Jaffa roof, via an American communications
satellite, from
mobile unit 16. A moment later, as the barefoot contessa copied the random groups of letters onto the software program, the
plain language text appeared below.

“F-a-l-s-e c-o-n-t-a-c-t d-u-e v-e-h-i-c-l-e p-a-s-s-i-n-g P-a-l-is-t-i-n-e A-u-t-h-o-r-i-t-y r-a-d-i-o t-o-w-e-r n-o j-o-y
r-e-p-e-a-t n-o j-o-y.”

The
katza
was on the phone moments later. “You’ve heard about the Rabbi’s secretary?” he asked Baruch over the scrambled line.

“I caught it on CNN. They said something about an anonymous phone call to the Palestinian police leading to the discovery
of the body. Hang on—the autopsy report is coming through.” Baruch came back on the line. “The murder has Abu Bakr’s signature—the
cause of death was a .22-caliber bullet fired directly into the base of the skull.”

“The mobile units reported in eighteen minutes before the hour. No joy. Not a peep. Something has gone very wrong.”

“Sweeney’s not in Aza,” Baruch said flatly.

The
katza
wasn’t ready to let go yet. “The person who phoned Sweeney instructed him to come to Aza. Then we found his car parked at
the entrance to Aza.”

“I played our tape of the conversation on Sweeney’s cell phone again. The Arab who phoned told him to take the Beit Shemesh-Kiryat
Gat road down to Aza. I could kick myself for not seeing it before. What did they care how he went to Aza as long as he got
there?”

“You think they flagged him down somewhere along the way and whisked him off in another direction, and then drove his car
down to Erez for us to find.”

“It’s possible.” Baruch corrected himself with a bitter laugh. “It’s
probable
.”

The
katza
let this sink in. “If you’re right, if Sweeney’s not in Aza, that means the Rabbi’s not in Aza.”

“Abu Bakr’s been planting clues with Aza written all over them since the kidnapping,” Baruch said. “The Aza bank calendar
we discovered on the wall, the kidnapper dressed in a short sleeved shirt, the Mercedes with the dead
mechabel
in the back, the cassette mailed
from an Aza post office—everything pointed to Aza. Then Sweeney is invited to Aza—they took it for granted we’d be tapping
his phones—and conveniently parks his car at the Erez crossing where we can find it. Now Efrayim’s body turns up on a garbage
dump outside Aza City.”

“If they could smuggle the Mercedes with the
mechabel
back into Aza after the kidnapping, I suppose they could smuggle Efrayim—alive and drugged, or dead and stuffed into a sack—into
Aza.”

“All roads were meant to lead to Aza,” Baruch plunged on. The more he talked, the more he became convinced he was right. “Which
meant we’d jump to the logical conclusion that the Rabbi wasn’t in Aza. Then we’d smile our superior smiles and assume we
were supposed to
jump
to this conclusion, and decide he was in Aza after all. But Abu Bakr was always one jump ahead of us.”

“If the Rabbi isn’t in Aza, it would explain the no-joy from the mobile units. My God, the Rabbi could be anywhere in Judea
or Samaria,” Baruch reminded himself. “Where do we start? Nablus? Hebron? Jenin? Tulkarm? Or one of the four hundred and sixty
Palestinian villages between them? We don’t have enough mobile units to check out an area that size.”

“There’s still Yussuf Abu Saleh,” Baruch reminded Elihu from his Jerusalem office.

“I hate Sa’adat’s guts,” the
katsa
growled from Jaffa. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think he’s on our side. But let’s hope he gets Abu Saleh to talk.
It may be our last shot at finding Apfulbaum before the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast.”

F
OR SEVERAL DAYS SA’ADAT’S “TECHNICIANS” HAD BEEN AVOIDING the deputy chief’s eye when he wandered into the interrogation chamber,
a scented handkerchief delicately pressed to his mouth and nose as the overhead fan stirred the stench that emanated from
festering wounds and loose bowels. The doctor who monitored Yussuf’s pulse and heartbeat was recommending longer and longer
periods of repose and allowing the technicians shorter and shorter working sessions, as they were called. As a result Sa’adat’s
specialists felt obliged to crowd a lot of “questioning” into the little time they were permitted with the prisoner. “Abu
Bakr has abandoned you,” one of them would whisper in Yussuf’s ear. “Why do you go through hell for him?”

“You have everything to gain, nothing to lose, by giving us the information we seek.”

“The Palestinian Authority punishes enemies and rewards friends.”

“Wise up. Don’t ruin your life for a scoundrel like Abu Bakr.”

“I am Koskovic, Asaf … a Bosnian … mistaken iden—”

The interrogator nodded at the man nearest the door, who tripped the switch, closing the electric circuit. The electrodes
attached to Yussuf’s testicles hummed. He gagged on the pain as his bruised body danced grotesquely in the air, then, as the
current was cut, sagged back and down onto the manacled wrists attached to the hook in the wall. Yussuf shrieked as the weight
of his body pulled on his dislocated shoulder. The doctor, his face a mask of professional
disinterest, checked the pulse and heart and, with a gesture, ordered the prisoner to be taken down from the wall. When Sa’adat
came by a quarter of an hour later he found Yussuf stretched out on the cement of the floor, his eyes fixed on the overhead
fan as he sucked short noisy doses of air through his tightly clenched teeth. Sa’adat kept the handkerchief pressed to his
mouth and nose as he leaned over the prisoner.