Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  Footsteps—

  A dog scampered along close to the wall, found Anselmo, whimpered. The same dog he’d disturbed on leaving the house? Not likely, he thought. The town was full of these craven whining beasts. This one poked its nose into Anselmo’s side and whimpered again. The sound was one the terrorist did not care for. He laid a hand on the back of the dog’s skull, gentling it. The whimpering continued at a slightly lower pitch. With his free hand, Anselmo drew the hunting knife from the sheath on his thigh. While he went on rubbing the back of the dog’s head he found the spot between the ribs. The animal had almost ceased to whimper when he sent the blade home, finding the heart directly, making the kill in silence. He wiped the blade in the dog’s fur and returned it to its sheath.

  A calm descended with the death of the dog. Anselmo licked a finger, held it overhead. Had the wind ceased to blow? It seemed to him that it had. He took a deep breath, released it slowly, got to his feet.

  He walked not in the shadows but down the precise middle of the narrow street. When the two men stepped into view ahead of him he did not turn aside or bolt for cover. His hand quivered, itching to reach for the Walther, but the calm which had come upon him enabled him to master this urge.

  He threw his hands high overhead. In reasonably good Hebrew he sang out, “I am your prisoner!” And he drew his lips back, exposing his bad teeth in a terrible grin.

  Both men trained their guns on him. He had faced guns innumerable times in the past and did not find them intimidating. But one of the men held his Uzi as if he was about to fire it. Moonlight glinted on the gun barrel. Anselmo, still grinning, waited for a burst of fire and an explosion in his chest.

  It never came.

  The two men sat in folding chairs and watched their prisoner through a one-way mirror. His cell was as small and bare as the room from which they watched him. He sat on a narrow iron bedstead and stroked his chin with the tips of his fingers. Now and then his gaze passed over the mirror.

  “You’d swear he can see us,” Gershon Meir said.

  “He knows we’re here.”

  “I suppose he must. The devil’s cool, isn’t he? Do you think he’ll talk?”

  Nahum Grodin shook his head.

  “He could tell us a great deal.”

  “He’ll never tell us a thing. Why should he? The man’s comfortable. He was comfortable dressed as an Arab and now he’s as comfortable dressed as a prisoner.”

  Anselmo had been disarmed, of course, and relieved of his loose-fitting Arab clothing. Now he wore the standard clothing issued to prisoners—trousers and a short-sleeved shirt of gray denim, cloth slippers. The trousers were of course beltless and the slippers had no laces.

  Grodin said, “He could be made to talk. No, nahr, I don’t mean torture. You watch too many films. Pentothal, if they’d let me use it. Although I suspect his resistance is high. He has such enormous confidence.”

  “The way he smiled when he surrendered to us.”

  “Yes.”

  “For a moment I thought—”

  “Yes?”

  “That you were going to shoot him, Nahum.”

  “I very nearly did.”

  “You suspected a trap? I suppose—”

  “No.” Grodin interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. Several of the joints throbbed slightly. “No,” he said, “I knew it was no trick. The man is a pragmatist. He knew he was trapped. He surrendered to save his skin.”

  “And you thought to shoot him anyway?”

  “I should have done it, Gershon. I should have shot him. Something made me hesitate. And you know the saying. He who hesitates and so forth, and I hesitated and was lost. I was not lost but the opportunity was. I should have shot him at once. Without hesitating, without thinking, without anything but an ounce of pressure on the trigger and a few punctuation marks for the night.”

  Gershon studied the man they were discussing. He had removed one of the slippers and was picking at his feet. Gershon wanted to look away but watched, fascinated. “You want him dead,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “We’re a progressive nation. We don’t put them to death anymore. Life imprisonment’s supposed to be punishment enough. You don’t agree?”

  “No.”

  “You like the eye-for-eye stuff, huh?”

  “ ‘And you shall return eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning.’ It’s not a terrible idea, you know. I would not be so quick to dismiss it out of hand.”

  “Revenge.”

  “Or retribution, more accurately. You can’t have revenge, my friend. Not in this sort of case. The man’s crimes are too enormous for his own personal death to balance them out. But that is not why I wish I’d killed him.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  Nahum Grodin aimed a forefinger at the glass. “Look,” he said. “What do you see?”

  “A piggish lout picking his feet.”

  “You see a prisoner.”

  “Of course. I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Nahum.”

  “You think you see a prisoner. But he is not our prisoner, Gershon.”

  “Oh?”

  “We are his prisoners.”

  “I do not follow that at all.”

  “No?” The older man massaged the knuckle of his right index finger. It was that finger, he thought, which had hesitated upon the trigger of the Uzi. And now it throbbed and ached. Arthritis? Or the punishment it deserved for its hesitation?

  “Nahum—”

  “We are at his mercy,” Grodin said crisply. “He’s our captive. His comrades will try to bring about his release. As long as he is our prisoner he is a sword pointed at our throats.”

  “That’s far-fetched.”

  “Do you really think so?” Nahum Grodin sighed. “I wish we were not so civilized as to have abolished capital punishment. And at this particular moment I wish we were a police state and this vermin could be officially described as having been shot while attempting to escape. We could take him outside right now, you and I, and he could attempt to escape.”

  Gershon shuddered. “We could not do that.”

  “No,” Grodin agreed. “No, we could not do that. But I could have gunned him down when I had the chance. Did you ever see a mad dog? When I was a boy in Lublin, Gershon, I saw one running wild. They don’t really foam at the mouth, you know. But I seem to remember that dog having a foamy mouth. And a policeman shot him down. I remember that he held his pistol in both hands, held it out in front of him with both arms fully extended. Do you suppose I actually saw the beast shot down or that the memory is in part composed of what I was told? I could swear I actually saw the act. I can see it now in my mind, the policeman with his legs braced and his two arms held out in front of him. And the dog charging. I wonder if that incident might have had anything to do with this profession I seem to have chosen.”

  “Do you think it did?”

  “I’ll leave that to the psychiatrists to decide.” Grodin smiled, then let the smile fade. “I should have shot this one down like a dog in the street,” he said. “When I had the chance.”

  “How is he dangerous in a cell?”

  “And how long will he remain in that cell?” Grodin sighed. “He is a leader. He has a leader’s magnetism. The world is full of lunatics to whom this man is special. They’ll demand his release. They’ll hijack a plane, kidnap a politician, hold schoolchildren for ransom.”

  “We have never paid ransom.”

  “No.”

  “They’ve made such demands before. We’ve never released a terrorist in response to extortion.”

  “Not yet we haven’t.”

  Both men fell silent. On the other side of the one-way mirror, the man called Anselmo had ceased picking his toes. Now he stripped to his underwear and seated himself on the bare tiled floor of his cell. His fingers interlaced behind his head, he began doing sit-ups. Muscles worked in his flat abdomen and his thin cord
ed thighs as he raised and lowered the upper portion of his body. He exercised rhythmically, pausing after each series of five sit-ups, then springing to his feet after he had completed six such series. Having done so, he paused deliberately to flash his teeth at the one-way mirror.

  “Look at that,” Gershon Meir said. “Like an animal.”

  Nahum Grodin’s right forefinger resumed aching.

  Grodin was right, of course. Revolutionaries throughout the world had very strong reasons for wishing to see Anselmo released from his cell. In various corners of the globe, desperate men plotted desperate acts to achieve this end.

  The first attempts were not successful. Less than a week after Anselmo was taken, four men and two women stormed a building in Geneva where high-level international disarmament talks were being conducted. Two of the men were shot, one fatally. One of the women had her arm broken in a struggle with a guard. The rest were captured. In the course of interrogation, Swiss authorities determined that the exercise had had as its object the release of Anselmo. The two women and one of the men were West German anarchists. The other three men, including the one who was shot dead, were Basque separatists.

  A matter of days after this incident, guerrillas in Uruguay stopped a limousine carrying the Israeli ambassador to a reception in the heart of Montevideo. Security police were following the ambassador’s limousine at the time, and the gun battle which ensued claimed the lives of all seven guerrillas, three security policemen, the ambassador, his chauffeur, and four presumably innocent bystanders. While the purpose of the attempted kidnapping was impossible to determine, persistent rumors linked the action to Anselmo.

  Within the week, Eritrean revolutionaries succeeded in skyjacking an El Al 747 en route from New York to Tel Aviv. The jet with 144 passengers and crew members was diverted to the capital of an African nation where it overshot the runway, crashed, and was consumed in flames. A handful of passengers survived. The remaining passengers, along with all crew members and the eight or ten Eritreans, were all killed.

  Palestinians seized another plane, this one an Air France jetliner. The plane was landed successfully in Libya and demands presented which called for the release of Anselmo and a dozen or so other terrorists then held by the Israelis. The demands were rejected out of hand. After several deadlines had come and gone, the terrorists began executing hostages, ultimately blowing up the plane with the remaining hostages aboard. According to some reports, the terrorists were taken into custody by Libyan authorities; according to other reports they were given token reprimands and released.

  After the affair in Libya, both sides felt they had managed to establish something. The Israelis felt they had proved conclusively that they would not be blackmailed. The loosely knit group who aimed to free Anselmo felt just as strongly that they had demonstrated their resolve to free him—no matter what risks they were forced to run, no matter how many lives, their own or others, they had to sacrifice.

  “If there were two Henry Clays,” said the bearer of that name after a bitterly disappointing loss of the presidency, “then one of them would make the other president of the United States of America.”

  It is unlikely that Anselmo knew the story. He cared nothing for the past, read nothing but current newspapers. But as he exercised in his cell his thoughts often echoed those of Henry Clay.

  If there were only two Anselmos, one could surely spring the other from this cursed jail.

  But it didn’t require a second Anselmo, as it turned out. All it took was a nuclear bomb.

  The bomb itself was stolen from a NATO installation forty miles from Antwerp. A theft of this sort is perhaps the most difficult way of obtaining such a weapon. Nuclear technology is such that anyone with a good grounding in college-level science can put together a rudimentary atomic bomb in his own basement workshop, given access to the essential elements. Security precautions being what they are, it is worlds easier to steal the component parts of a bomb than the assembled bomb itself. But in this case it was necessary not merely to have a bomb but to let the world know that one had a bomb. Hence the theft via a daring and dramatic dead-of-night raid. While media publicity was kept to a minimum, people whose job it was to know such things knew overnight that a bomb had been stolen, and that the thieves had in all likelihood been members of the Peridot Gang.

  The Peridot Gang was based in Paris, although its membership was international in nature. The gang was organized to practice terrorism in the Anselmo mode. Its politics were of the left, but very little ideology lay beneath the commitment to extremist activism. Security personnel throughout Europe and the Middle East shuddered at the thought of a nuclear device in the hands of the Peridots. Clearly they had not stolen the bomb for the sheer fun of it. Clearly they intended to make use of it, and clearly they were capable of almost any outrage.

  Removing the bomb from the Belgian NATO installation had been reasonably difficult. In comparison, disassembling it and smuggling it into the United States, then transporting it into New York City and reassembling it and finally installing it in the interfaith meditation chamber of the United Nations—all of that was simplicity itself.

  Once the meditation chamber had been secured, a Peridot emissary presented a full complement of demands. Several of these had to do with guaranteeing the eventual safety of gang members at the time of their withdrawal from the chamber, the UN building, and New York itself. Another, directed at the General Assembly of the United Nations, called for changes in international policy toward insurgent movements and revolutionary organizations. Various individual member nations were called upon to liberate specific political prisoners, including several dozen persons belonging to or allied with the Peridot organization. Specifically, the government of Israel was instructed to grant liberty to the man called Anselmo.

  Any attempt to seize the bomb would be met by its detonation. Any effort to evacuate the United Nations building or New York itself would similarly prompt the Peridots to set the bomb off. If all demands were not met within ten days of their publication, the bomb would go off.

  Authorities differed in their estimates of the bomb’s lethal range. But the lowest estimate of probable deaths was in excess of one million.

  Throughout the world, those governments blackmailed by the Peridots faced up to reality. One after the other they made arrangements to do what they could not avoid doing. Whatever their avowed policy toward extortion, however great their reluctance to liberate terrorists, they could not avoid recognizing a fairly simple fact: they had no choice.

  Anselmo could not resist a smile when the two men came into the room. How nice, he thought, that it was these two who came to him. They had captured him in the first place, they had attempted to interrogate him time and time again, and now they were on hand to make arrangements for his release. It seemed to him that there was something fitting in all of this.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess I won’t be with you much longer, eh?”

  “Not much longer,” the older man said.

  “When do you release me?”

  “The day after tomorrow. In the morning. You are to be turned over to Palestinians at the Syrian border. A private jet will fly you to one of the North African countries, either Algeria or Libya. I don’t have the details. I don’t believe they have been finalized as yet.”

  “It hardly matters.”

  The younger of the Israelis, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, cleared his throat. “You won’t want to leave here in prison clothes,” he said. “We can give you what you wore when you were captured or you may have western dress. It’s your choice.”

  “You are very accommodating,” Anselmo told him.

  The man’s face colored. “The choice is yours.”

  “It’s of no importance to me.”

  “Then you’ll walk out as you walked in.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I wear.” He touched his gray denim clothing. “Just so it’s not this.” And he favored them with a smile again.

&nb
sp; The older man unclasped a small black bag, drew out a hypodermic needle. Anselmo raised his eyebrows. “Pentothal,” the man said.

  “You could have used it before.”

  “It was against policy.”

  “And has your policy changed?”

  “Obviously.”

  “A great deal has changed,” the younger man added. “A package bill passed the Knesset last evening. There was a special session called for the purpose. The death penalty has been restored.”

  “Ah.”

  “For certain crimes only. Crimes of political terrorism. Any terrorists captured alive will be brought to trial within three days after capture. If convicted, sentence will be carried out within twenty-four hours after it has been pronounced.”

  “Was there much opposition to this bill?”

  “There was considerable debate. But when it came to a vote the margin was overwhelming for passage.”

  Anselmo considered this in the abstract. “It seems to me that it is an intelligent bill,” he said at length. “I inspired it, eh?”

  “You might say that.”

  “So you will avoid this sort of situation in the future. But of course there is a loss all the same. No doubt that explains the debate. You will not look good to the rest of the world, executing prisoners so quickly after capture. There will be talk of kangaroo courts, star chamber hearings, that sort of thing.” He flashed his teeth. “But what choice did you have? None.”

  “There’s another change that did not require legislation,” the older man said. “An unofficial change of policy for troops and police officers. We will have slower reflexes when it comes to noticing that a man is attempting to surrender.”

  Anselmo laughed aloud at the phrasing. “Slower reflexes! You mean you will shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “Something along those lines.”

  “Also an intelligent policy. I shall make my own plans accordingly. But I don’t think it will do you very much good, you know.”

  The man shrugged. The hypodermic needle looked small in his big gnarled hand. “The pentothal,” he said. “Will it be necessary to restrain you? Or will you cooperate?”