Vicious Circle (30 page)

“I have a photograph to show you,” he said. “Can you hear me, Yussuf Abu Saleh?”

“Koskovic, Asaf,” Yussuf muttered.

Sa’adat produced a color photograph from the breast pocket of his shiny synthetic suit jacket and held it up directly in front
of the prisoner’s eyes. It took a while for Yussuf to focus on the photograph. Then it took half a minute more for what he
saw to register in his brain. He swallowed hard and exhaled and rocked his head from side to side as if he were trying to
obliterate an image; undo an event.

“You recognize the corpse?” Sa’adat demanded. “There is no mistake. It is your wife, Maali, dead as a stuffed camel. The photograph
was taken as she was being dressed by her father’s servants for the funeral.”

“How?” Tears filled Yussuf’s eyes. “Why?”

“Abu Bakr discovered that she had betrayed you to the Jews and sentenced her to death as punishment,” Sa’adat lied. “Open
your eyes. Look again. You can see the bruise on her forehead where she was bludgeoned with a blunt instrument. Her death
was excruciatingly painful and extremely slow.” A moan of pure despair seeped from the back of the prisoner’s throat. “Abu
Bakr punished your bride,” Sa’adat continued. “He is Satan masquerading as the
mujaddid
. He is a false prophet who mocks Islam with his pretensions. You owe him nothing.” Sa’adat snapped his fingers at a guard.
“A glass of water.”

The doctor lifted Yussuf’s head and raised a tumbler to his lips. Yussuf felt the water trickle down his throat.

Sa’adat slipped the photograph of Maali into Yussuf’s good hand and stood up. “Bring him a mattress, a robe. Wash him. Feed
him some broth. I will return in half an hour. When he has had time to
study the photograph, he will realize this has all been a terrible mistake and tell us what we want to know, won’t you, Yussuf?”

When Sa’adat had gone, the doctor and another technician lifted Yussuf onto his knees so that he could urinate into the plastic
bucket. Before scurrying off to look for a mattress and a robe, they helped him settle into a twisted sitting position, his
right shoulder against the wall, his left shoulder, swollen and deformed, hunched in front of his chest.

At noon the recorded voice of the
muezzin
summoning the nation of Islam to prayer reached Yussuf’s ears. The single guard remaining in the interrogation chamber, a
bearded man with a broken nose who happened to be pious, turned to face Mecca and prostrated himself on the floor. Yussuf,
his eyes swollen to slits, raised the photograph and studied it. It was Maali, there was no doubt about it. She was laid out
on the narrow table on which her father’s servants worked dough into loaves. Her face and half-naked body were the color of
chalk, her long jet-black hair was combed out behind her. He could make out the dark smudge of a bruise on her forehead. Her
lids were closed; the fire smoldering in the eyes he loved more than life and almost as much as the Qur’an had been extinguished.
Yussuf crushed the photograph against his chest. In a haze of despair, he could make out a woman shrugging the thin straps
of a night dress off her shoulders, drawing the turtleneck over a man’s head, pressing herself against his body. “My heart,
my husband, welcome home to your bridal chamber, welcome to your marriage bed,” the woman murmured.

The memory produced more pain than the electric shocks to his testicles.

Sa’adat had been lying through his teeth, of course. Yussuf had been betrayed into the hands of the Authority’s secret police
by someone—it could have been the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque, it could have been the Hamas people from
Nablus, who were still bitter at him for defecting to the
mujaddid
with half the members of his cell. It could
not
have been Maali, of that he was positive. She would have died before betraying him. And he would die before he betrayed the
mujaddid
.

Yussuf raised his bruised eyes. The remaining guard was still praying, his back to the prisoner. The two electrodes were arranged
on a piece of canvas between Yussuf and the guard. The electric wires ran off from the electrodes to a crude, jury-rigged
interrupter, and from there to a socket in the wall near the door. Gripping a leather strap hanging from a hook in the wall,
Yussuf struggled onto his knees. Then, easing the plastic bucket with urine along with his right hand, dragging his left shoulder
and left arm behind him, he crawled soundlessly across the concrete toward the electrodes. He could hear the guard muttering
verses from the Qur’an as he reached the electrodes. Muslims believed that it was a sin to commit suicide, but you were perfectly
justified in taking the life of someone who was going to betray Islam. If the torture continued, he would end up betraying
the
mujaddid
. Yussuf had been wrestling with the moral dilemma for days. Now, for the first time, he could see the straight path stretching
before him. In the Book of Deeds it would be recorded by the angel Jibril that Yussuf Abu Saleh had killed someone to prevent
him from betraying the nation of Islam. Tonight he would rest in Gardens of Eden at the side of Maali, he would quench his
thirst from the pure rivers flowing under them. Tonight he would sit at the right hand of God. Moving warily, he worked the
electrodes onto his chest, one pinched to each nipple. He maneuvered the bucket so that it was next to his useless hand, and
lowered his fingers into the cool urine.

Yussuf looked up just as the bearded guard turned his head to check on the prisoner. The guard’s eyes gaped and he groaned
“Noooooooo!” He leaped for the prisoner as Yussuf, mustering the last of his strength and all of his will power, lunged for
the interrupter.

E
LIHU FINISHED THE STORY AND THEN FELL QUIET. FOR BARUCH, at the other end of the line in his Jerusalem office, the silence
came across as the distant whine of a jet engine idling; this was the constant background sound of the telephone signal being
scrambled by an electronic device. Finally the
katsa
came back on the line, drowning out the distinctive whine. “Can you tell me what live electric wires were doing in the same
room as the prisoner, for God’s sake?”

Baruch said huskily, “You don’t want to go there.”

“Shit.”

“Shit,” Baruch agreed. “Elihu, I’d better get something off my chest. As long as I live, don’t ever ask me to do business
with Sa’adat or anyone like him again.”

The
katsa
thought about this. “The Russians have a proverb,” he finally said. “
To dine with the devil use a long spoon
. You’ll notice the proverb doesn’t suggest you shouldn’t dine with the devil. On the contrary, it assumes you will one day
be obliged to and merely advises you to take a sensible precaution. If you sleep with the devil, use a condom; if you dine
with him, use a long spoon. When you decide that it’s in the interests of the State of Israel, you’ll do business with Sa’adat.
So will I. What that day comes, let’s be sure to use a long spoon.” Elihu could be heard chewing on the stem of his pipe.
“Well, I suppose that’s that, then. You have to hand it to Abu Saleh—electrocuting yourself under the noses of your jailers
takes a certain amount of ingenuity, not to mention courage. So there’s nothing left
to do now except wait for the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast, after which the Rabbi’s body will turn up on some rubbish
heap and Abu Bakr will reveal to the world what Apfulbaum told him about the Jewish terrorists in Beit Avram. I hope to God
Sweeney surfaces to file his interview with Abu Bakr.”

In Jerusalem, Baruch let his eye run down the neatly typed list of names that the brothers Karamazov had left on his desk,
along with letters of resignation from the two researchers who were allergic to dust. Next to each name on the typed list
was a number; next to the last name was the number one hundred eighty-three. A yellow Post-it had been stuck to the bottom
of the page. “Azazel has only now emerged from the basement’s dusty bins (in as grumpy a mood as I’ve ever seen him) with
the names of twelve more potential Abu Bakrs, herein attached.” Twelve more names were printed on the Post-it immediately
over the signature: “Yours ’til the stars cease to shine, Absalom.”

Baruch toyed with the idea of filling the
katsa
in on the brothers Karamazov: they were combing the list to see how many of the one hundred and ninety-five short, heavy
males on it had had formal medical training. But he let it go. They might come up with forty. Or none. And the Working Group
would be right back where it was now, with the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee phoning the unlisted
number in Jaffa every hour on the hour to pass on the latest pithy comment from the Prime Minister; with surrogates from the
Shin Bet and the Mossad quarreling in public over who was responsible for the fiasco; with the leader of the opposition boasting
on television talk shows that if he were running things, Islamic fundamentalists would not get away with killing Jews; with
a prominent Rabbi from the settlements openly asking how the government could go to Washington and sign a peace treaty with
Palestinians who had the blood of Jews on their hands.

“Hang in there,” Elihu told Baruch, though he might have been talking to himself. And the distant whine of the electronic
device scrambling the conversation was replaced by the banal purr an Israeli phone makes when it offers up a dial tone.

A
BSALOM STUCK HIS HEAD IN BARUCH’S DOOR. “HERE’S THE latest bulletin from the dust bins,” he drawled, slipping into a good
imitation of BBC Hebrew. “Azazel came up with a short, heavy ex-convict who had an eye shot out in the Sixty-seven war and
sports an eye-patch that makes him look like one of those old advertisements for Hathaway shirts. The Palestinian in question
flunked out of a Cairo medical school after two years and wound up opening a pharmacy, which he still operates, in the village
of Jalazun near Ramallah. How’s that for formal medical training? At one point in his life he was denounced and arrested,
but released for lack of evidence. Watch this space for more bulletins.”

Baruch raised his wrist so Absalom could see his watch. “Tomorrow is the last day of Ramadan.”

“I’m dancing as fast as I can,” mewled Absalom. Grimacing as if he had been stung by a bee, he vanished down the corridor.

T
HE VOLUNTEER NURSES HAD FINISHED DISINFECTING THE WAITING room and were about to lock up for the morning when the woman, in
her early twenties and very pregnant, appeared at the door of the clinic. There was an air of desperation about her. She was
immediately taken in to see Doctor al-Shaath.

“What is the problem?” he asked.

The young woman, who kept the veil over the lower part of her face as she spoke, stared intently at the bruise on the Doctor’s
forehead. “My child reaches term in ten days,” she said in a low voice.

“Do you have a husband?”

“He is being held in an Isra’ili detention camp in the Negev.” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were not being
overheard. “I came to you because I cannot go to a hospital for the delivery—I am on the Isra’ili wanted list.”

“What did you do to merit this honor?”

“I smuggled explosives into Tel Aviv for my cousin Daoud, who blew himself to heaven and twenty Jewish infidels to hell in
a shopping mall. It was child’s play for me to cross the green line—when the Isra’ili girl soldiers on duty confirmed I was
pregnant, they did not search me further. But a man from my village spoke of my role on a portable telephone. He was overheard
by the Isra’ilis and I had to flee to avoid arrest.” The woman absently kneaded the taut surface of her bulging stomach with
the palms of her hands as she squirmed to alleviate the pain in the small of her back. “You cannot refuse me.
I do not wish my baby to be born in a Jewish prison hospital. I ask you to perform a cesarean delivery. Now.”

The nurses administered a spinal anesthetic, and the Doctor performed the operation on the stainless-steel table in the clinic’s
examination room. With his head bent directly over the scalpel and the fingers of his left hand guiding him, he cut through
the skin and fatty tissue with a vertical incision that began under the navel and ended above the pubic bone. As the two nurses
sponged blood away from the open wound, he cut through the fascia and the lining of the abdominal cavity, exposing the uterus.
Working swiftly, he made a crosswise incision in the lower part of the uterus above the bladder. Reaching in, he pressed the
bladder downward before enlarging the opening in the muscular wall of the uterus to expose the placenta and the fetus. As
the nurse ruptured the sac filled with amniotic fluid she told the mother, “Rejoice—you are bringing into the world a man
child.” Reaching in with both hands, the Doctor grasped the fetus, worked it free of the uterus and handed it to one of the
nurses while the other nurse cut the umbilical cord. The first nurse gripped the baby by its ankles and slapped it lightly
on the buttocks. A rich pinkness seeped through the child’s etiolated body and he uttered his first tentative gasps, and then
bawled at the top of his tiny lungs. On the table, the young woman laughed and cried at the same time. The Doctor removed
the placenta, and with the deft gestures of a seamstress, stitched up the layers of wounds. “There is a cot in the small room
off the toilet,” he told the young woman as he worked. “You will have to remain hidden there for four, perhaps five days.
The nurses will take turns staying with you. They will give you medication for the pain you will experience when the anesthesia
wears off. You are young and strong and pious—put your trust in God and you will not have any difficulty in coping.”

The young woman clutched the newborn baby to her breast. “I know who you are,” she blurted to the Doctor. “That our first-born
has been brought into this imperfect world by the
mujaddid
brings great honor to my husband, to my family, to my clan. I will call the boy Daoud, after my martyred cousin.”