“That means he was shot in the lungs,” the Doctor said.
“He cannot be allowed to fall alive into the hands of the Jews,” Yussuf warned. “He knows too much.”
“We must get the two Mercedes into Ghazeh before dawn,” one of the Palestinians called nervously.
The Doctor could feel the hot breath of the khamsin on his cheek. He said, “Two minutes,” and climbed into the back seat alongside the wounded man. He cradled the boy’s head in his arms. “Anwar,” he whispered. “It is me, the Doctor.”
Anwar, who was in his early twenties, opened his eyes. He coughed up blood, then gasped for air. With infinite gentleness, the Doctor’s fingers worked their way under the boy’s turtleneck and probed his chest until they found the entry wound. It was immediately above the latissimus dorsi and angled up toward the left lung. There was no exit wound, which probably meant the bullet had struck a rib and caused massive trauma inside the body.
An ugly gurgling sound came from the back of the boy’s throat. “I am going to pull out of this, right?” he whispered.
The Doctor leaned over him until his lips were touching the boy’s ear. “Even better. Tonight you will enjoy the company of seventy-two virgin brides; tonight you will talk with the Prophet.” In the darkness he brought a hand up to the boy’s skull, which was damp with perspiration, and began to search with the tips of his fingers for the distinctive knob of bone behind the ear. “‘Whosoever fights in the way of God and is slain,’” he murmured, quoting one of his favorite passages in the Qur’an, “‘we shall bring him a mighty wage.’” He slipped the pearl-handled Beretta from his breast pocket and pulled back the slide on the top of the barrel to chamber the first round, then warmed the tip of the barrel in the palm of his hand before pressing it to the spot immediately under the knob of bone. Holding the boy’s head against the car’s arm rest, he pulled the trigger. There was a hollow report, something like a husky cough, as the pistol sent the bullet drilling into the skull. The boy’s body jerked once before collapsing back into the seat.
Moments later the two Mercedes, with the still warm body of the martyr on the floor in the back of the second car, were speeding west along Bedouin tracks toward the Gaza Strip. The Suzuki with Israeli license plates and its two passengers, both carrying forged papers identifying them as Arabs from Abu Tor, a half Palestinian, half Jewish village outside of Jerusalem, headed north toward the main coastal highway. The Doctor planned to go to ground in Abu Tor. When things quieted down, he would make his way, tapping a long thin bamboo cane on the pavement before him, past the Israeli checkpoints to the safe house perched above the maze of streets in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and, God willing, begin the interrogation of the Rabbi.
THREE
CROUCHING BEHIND A PILE OF CINDER BLOCKS, YUSSUF ABU Saleh waited until the Israeli patrol completed its sweep along the road that separated the Jewish half of Abu Tor from the Palestinian half. From the Old City of Jerusalem beyond the Hinnom Valley—the Gehenna where people burned garbage in the time of the Islamic Messenger Jesus—a bell atop the Church of the Holy Sepulcher tolled the half hour. As the echo faded, Yussuf scaled the wall and dropped into the garden behind his father-in-law’s villa. A dog in one of the Jewish houses on the top of the hill bayed at the moon hanging over Mount Scopus. Several dogs in the Arab houses below barked back. The ancient saluki tied to a tree in the garden stood up and sniffed at the air, but sank back onto the grass when she recognized the intruder. Making his way across the garden to a trellis, Yussuf climbed through an old rose bush to the small balcony on the second floor. Inside the villa everything was dark. He scratched at the window. In the room a match flared, and then the wick of a candle burned brightly. An instant later the window was flung open and Yussuf found himself in the arms of his wife.
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” Maali murmured into his neck, her lips pressed to his skin. “My house is your house.”
“This is not the sentiment of your father,” Yussuf noted.
“My father is a lawyer,” she whispered back. “He sees only the legal aspects of what you do. He has lost sight of who is right and who is wrong.” She discovered blood in the palm of his hand where a thorn had nicked the skin and kissed it away. Shrugging the thin straps of her night dress off her shoulders, she drew the turtleneck over his head and pressed herself against his body. “My heart, my husband, welcome home to your bridal chamber, welcome to your marriage bed.”
“You are wonderfully beautiful,” Yussuf declared. “Two weeks is a long time for lovers,”
Maali led him to the brass bed and pulled him down on top of her. “It has been sixteen days and sixteen nights, my love, my heart. Where have you been to?”
Yussuf ran his fingers through her jet black hair and looked down to see if the fire was still smoldering in the eyes he loved. “There are questions a wife does not ask,” he instructed her. He kissed her shoulder and her breast and her mouth. Then he sat up. “We have been married six months tonight. I have an anniversary gift for you.”
“You are my gift,” she insisted, but she smiled with delight.
He produced a ring from his pocket. She raised the candle to inspect it. She could make out the words “Erasmus Hall” and the date 1998 inscribed on the inside of the ring, and some sort of crest on the stone in its center. “Never before have I seen such a ring,” Maali said. “Where did you get it?”
“From a Jew named Erasmus Hall.”
“You would have me wear a ring bought from a Jew?”
Yussuf smiled. “I took it from him. He did not object because he was dead.”
“Who made the Jew Erasmus Hall dead?”
“I and my friends did. I noticed the ring on his small finger. When I could not remove it, I took out my pocket knife and cut off his finger.”
Yussuf tried to put the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, which was believed to be directly connected to the heart. When it wouldn’t fit, he took her finger into his mouth and sucked it. He removed her wedding band and worked the Jew’s ring over the joint and onto her finger, and then replaced the gold wedding band. “The ring of the late Erasmus Hall is so tight you would not be able to remove it even if you wanted to.”
Maali held up her hand and inspected the ring. “You actually took it from a dead Jew!” she whispered.
“I hate them. Killing them is not enough after what they did to me, to my family, to my people, to my religion.” He tightened his grip on her shoulders. “I cut off the finger and threw it to a dog in Abu Tor.”
Maali declared with emotion, “I will wear this trophy of your victory over the Jews with pride.”
Yussuf stripped and stood on a small Bedouin carpet as Maali sponged his body, and the healed bullet wound in the flesh of his shoulder, with orange blossom water from an enamel bowl. She fed him dates and wedges of apple to break the Ramadan fast. Then she took his hand and led him to the brass bed to break the marriage fast.
FOUR
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, A TALL, LEAN MAN DRESSED IN A pinstriped suit hovered over the wounded boy on the gurney as he was being rushed toward surgery through the scrubbed, harshly lit corridors of Hadassah Hospital. A male nurse trotted along on the other side holding high a plastic container of glucose, which dripped through a tube into the boy’s forearm. The hair on the boy’s head was matted with blood; a piece of his scalp hung loose like a flap, exposing a section of skull the color of sidewalk. On the stretcher, the boy’s jaw worked, as if he were chewing on words but having trouble swallowing them. “… short … heavy-set … short cropped hair …” The man in the pinstriped suit leaned closer to catch the rest. A orderly materialized at the double door of the surgical theater. “The police are not permitted past this point,” he announced.
Straightening, the tall, lean man backed away and turned to watch through a window as half a dozen doctors in pale green smocks and surgical masks, moving with the languid grace of people underwater, bent over the wounded
man. Then a nurse inside the operating theater tugged closed the curtains, blocking the view into the room.
FIVE
AS THE FIRST STREAKS OF DAWN STAINED THE SKY IN THE EAST, Maali came awake with a start to discover the candle sizzling at the end of its wick and Yussuf’s dark eyes fixed on her as if he never expected to see his wife again; as if the memory of her was all he could take with him. “You must be gone before it grows light,” she warned with a shudder. “The Jews come around every day or two asking about you.”
“What do you tell them?”
“My father says you are an outlaw and not welcome under his roof. I say that I am the bride of a holy warrior fighting a holy war.”
Yussuf grinned at the spectacle of his wife facing down both her father and the Jews. “How do the Jews react when you tell them this?”
“The one with eyeglasses and the insignia of an officer on his shoulders laughs. The tall one who wears a ring in his ear like a woman calls me a whore. He says they will kill you and have sexual intercourse with me. He uses a vulgar expression for sexual intercourse.” Maali drew her husband closer and lowered her voice. “I do not tell the Jews, I do not permit the thought to pass my lips when I talk to my father, I barely whisper it to myself: I am the wife of a servant of the mujaddid.”
“The Doctor does not say this in so many words.”
“He does not deny it.”
“He acknowledges it as a possibility.” Yussuf pressed his lips against Maali’s ear. “He bears the mark of Allah on his forehead—a permanent bruise that comes from pounding his head against the floor when he prays. The Doctor is a holy man who talks to God.”
“Repeat to me the mujaddid’s message.”
Yussuf focused on the flame dancing at the end of the candle; the light was suddenly so intense it caused his eyes to smart and he had to turn away. “He believes in a universal Islam that rises above Sunni-Shii differences. He teaches that Islam has not failed Muslims; we have failed Islam. He teaches that you are either a true believer or a kafir, an infidel who rejects the message of Islam and the Messenger. There is no middle ground. He teaches that Islam united the tribes under the Prophet Muhammad; that the tribes, acting in the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate who is closer than the jugular, routed the Byzantine and Persian armies, conquered Iraq and Syria and Palestine and Persia and Egypt and Morocco and Libya and Spain. He teaches that the lessons of history are clear for those who wish to learn them: Muslim victory depends on faithfulness to the word of God and the example of the Prophet. When we suffer defeat, it is to be interpreted as the price we must pay for our infidelity.”
Maali clung to her husband. “I worry about you—I dream terrible dreams in which you are being tortured to death. I am terrified you will be betrayed—”
Yussuf kissed his wife’s neck. “That is out of the realm of possibility.” He reached over to retrieve his wallet from a shirt pocket, and pulled a small folded piece of paper from it. “Take a look. All the members of the Abu Bakr Brigade carry this in their wallets—it serves as a secret identity card. The copies are numbered. Mine is number seven. The paper is a kind of coded organizational chart. The Doctor has patterned his Abu Bakr Brigade along the lines of the human nervous system. Each cell is completely independent from every other cell. Orders originate in the heart of the Doctor’s cell. Dendrites branch out from the cell body to carry out these orders. Instructions to other cells are passed along something called the axon, which snakes out from the main cell but never actually makes contact with the other cells. The messages from one cell to another are transmitted at a gap called the synapse, where the cells approach each other but do not touch.”
Maali became aware that she could make out the color of Yussuf’s eyes. She moistened her thumb and first finger and snuffed out the flame of the candle between them. Sighing, she leaped from the bed and began to throw on clothing. “Where are you off to this time?” she wanted to know.
“I told you there are questions—” He shook his head; the Maali who defied both her father and the Israelis could be trusted. “To Jerusalem. To the Old City.”
She wound a cotton scarf over her head, covering all of her face except her eyes. “You will attract less attention if you are accompanied by a woman.”
“There is no question of your going with me.”
Her eyes burned brightly in the folds of the scarf. “There is no question of my not going with you. Besides which, it is too great a distance to go on foot.”
Yussuf gave in with a grin. “I permit you to accompany me, but only as far as the Damascus Gate.”
“And I,” Maali said with a shrewd laugh, “permit you to permit me.”
She wheeled her scooter out of the tool shed in the back of the garden and walked it downhill until she could no longer see her father’s villa. Yussuf appeared from an alley, climbed onto the scooter and kicked over the motor. Maali rode sidesaddle behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other around his waist, as the scooter bounced down Siloam Road under what the Christians call the Mount of Olives and onto Jericho Road. Pickup trucks brimming with crates of vegetables and jugs of olive oil and bamboo cages filled with live chickens converged on the Sultan Suleiman Road heading toward the Damascus Gate, the main Arab entrance into the old walled city.
At the side of the road in front of the Damascus Gate, Maali took leave of her husband. “We will lay again in the marriage bed,” she declared fiercely. “It is written.”
“Inshallah,” he said. “God willing.” He touched the back of her hand with the back of his hand. On the spur of the moment, he whispered, “If you need me, leave a message for Tayzir the florist with the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter. He is our synapse, where the cells approach each other but do not touch.”
“For Tayzir the florist,” she repeated, proud to be trusted with this information, “with the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter.”
Yussuf started toward the gate. When Maali saw him looking over his shoulder, she pulled off her scarf and shook loose her long black hair and raised the hand with the Jew’s ring on the fourth finger in proud salute. Her husband waved back. Then, tucking the end of his kaffiyeh under the headband so that the lower half of his face was hidden, he ambled past the Israeli paratroopers lounging under the archway. One of the soldiers, with a whip antenna jutting from his backpack, spoke into a telephone. “Mobile unit four,” he said, “at the Damascus Gate, seven thirty, nothing unusual to report.”
In a stairwell near the Israelis, Mr. Hajji, the stooped Palestinian who as far back as anyone could remember had been guarding valises and changing money for tourists, was chalking up the day’s exchange rates on a black board. “Sorry, sorry,” he told a Bedouin woman clutching two live chickens by their legs. Narrowing his eyes, he looked past her at the young woman outside the gate whose features looked vaguely familiar. “I do not deal in rubles,” he mumbled, his mind elsewhere.
SIX
Across the Levant, Muslims were sitting down to the evening “break-fast.” Off the Israeli coast, the running lights of a tanker clawing like a crab toward Haifa flickered in the dusk. Eight minutes later the ship’s bow wave lapped against the Jaffa shore and trickled up the beach to the terrace of the seafood restaurant run by a retired general who free-lanced for the Mossad’s Paha, the department that tracked the daily movements of Palestinian terrorist groups. A billboard on the roof of the restaurant, illuminated by two spotlights, announced the establishment’s name in Hebrew, and added in English: “One whale of a meal.” The billboard wasn’t only there for publicity purposes; hidden behind it was a bank of short and medium wave antennas that would have revealed, to anyone who spotted them, that fish weren’t the only thing being fried on the premises. The parking lot at the side of the restaurant was filled to capacity, but not all of the cars belonged to clients. In the restaurant itself, waiters in white aprons scurried between the kitche
n and the crowded tables carrying trays filled with fresh mackerel, sea bass and the day’s special, shark. Off the kitchen, a creaky wooden staircase led to a thick curtain that concealed a steel door surveyed by a hidden security camera. In the narrow hallway beyond the steel door sat a burly former paratrooper armed with a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. In a dimly lit room off the narrow hallway, half a dozen men in civilian clothing were gathered around a large Sony television set. The image on the screen, grainy and slightly out of focus, showed Rabbi Apfulbaum, his wrists handcuffed before him, sitting on a heavy wooden chair in front of a bricked-in window. He looked pale as death, but those who had seen him in person or on television talk shows knew that he always looked pale as death. Curiously, he didn’t appear to be frightened; what could have passed for a faint smile of satisfaction played on his thin lips, as if what had happened to him proved that he had been right all along. The left sleeves of his shirt and jacket were slit to the elbow; the loose cloth flapped around his wrist when he moved his hand to brush away a fly. The Rabbi’s eyes, pressed into a permanent squint, stared out at the camera; stared out at the men studying the image on the television screen.
“He’s squinting,” noted a voice in the darkened room, growling in slightly slurred Hebrew, “because he is unable to focus without his eyeglasses, which were found at the scene of the kidnapping. Without glasses he is virtually blind; he can only make out shapes and shadows. As for the sleeve, our people assume that the terrorists anesthetized him with an injection after the kidnapping.”
“Notice the bruise on his forehead,” remarked Baruch, the detective from Mishteret Yisra’el, the national police force. He combed his fingers through a mane of prematurely white hair; each hair, he would say on the rare occasions he talked about it, represented a tear he had not shed. “In religious circles, it’s known that it comes from drumming his head against the stone when he prays at the Wailing Wall.”
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