Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  Baruch realized Sa’adat did know something about the kidnapping after all. He was just taking his sweet time before sharing it.

  Sa’adat lifted the Russian revolver from the pile of dossiers and set it down on the desk with the barrel pointing directly at Elihu. He pulled out one file folder and opened it. “Being an Arabist, you will surely be familiar with Islamic tradition that holds that God sends down to earth, at the beginning of every century, what we call a mujaddid and you translate as Renewer, to restore to Islam the greatness it possessed in the time of the Prophet and the first khalifa.”

  Elihu leaned forward. “An American journalist published an article a few days ago that mentioned this Renewer. The journalist claimed a fundamentalist cleric in Aza told him that many among them believed that this Abu Bakr is the long-awaited mujaddid.”

  A telephone rang in an adjoining room. A woman’s voice, muffled, could be heard telling someone that Sa’adat was in conference. “The Authority’s Preventive Security apparatus started picking up murmurs of a mujaddid two and a half years ago,” Sa’adat continued. “It began in the city of Hebron and then seemed to spread north to Jerusalem itself, and eventually into Ghazeh. People talked about it in whispers behind closed doors. According to these rumors, the Renewer was a blind man who saw more clearly than those with sight. He was so pious that he bore like a badge on his forehead what the Holy Qur’an calls the trace of prostration. He taught that Islam had not failed Muslims; Muslims had failed Islam. He taught that faithfulness to the word of God and the example of the Prophet would bring victory over the Jewish infidels. He quoted from the Qur’an the passage that begins, ‘If there be twenty of you, patient men, they will overcome two hundred; if there be a hundred of you, they will overcome a thousand unbelievers.’”

  “Were you able to discover the identity of this Renewer?” Baruch asked.

  Sa’adat’s gold teeth flashed. “Before his untimely death, one of the Palestinians hanging by his wrists from an Isra’ili hook in the wall”—the Authority’s deputy intelligence chief looked directly at Elihu as he said this—“told of a nearly blind vigilante who was executing Palestinians accused of collaborating with the Jewish infidels. According to this prisoner, the vigilante and the mujaddid were the same person. Because he was practically blind, this vigilante had a distinctive method of carrying out the sentence of death—he probed with his finger tips behind the condemned man’s ear, and then fired a single small caliber bullet with surgical precision into the base of his brain.”

  Elihu looked at Baruch. “Of course! Since he’s blind, he is obliged to shoot at point blank range. And since he is shooting at point blank range, he uses a small caliber pistol that is so quiet it doesn’t need a silencer.” He turned to the Palestinian security chief. “We have a record of eighteen such murders.” He stressed the word “murders.”

  Sa’adat said, “All told, there were twenty-three executions.” He stressed the word “executions.” “The difference between your count and ours is due to the fact that five of the bodies were never turned over to the Isra’ili occupation authorities.”

  Baruch said, “One of the Jewish bodyguards who died in the kidnapping, as well as the terrorist whose body was found in the abandoned car, were killed by .22-caliber bullets fired into the brain stem from point blank range.”

  “Let us agree,” Sa’adat said with bland innocence, “that the kidnapping of your Rabbi bears the signature of our blind mujaddid. I tell you sincerely, this vigilante is as much a menace to the Palestinian Authority and its Chairman as he is to you Jews. There is no telling what ordinary Palestinians, responding to his simple call to wage holy war against the Jews, might do if they come to believe he is God’s long-awaited Renewer. Every mosque in Islam will open its doors to him; every Muslim will join his army to fight against the infidel. The Authority’s peace of the brave with the Isra’ilis will be swept away by a sea of fundamentalist warriors obeying edicts issued by the mujaddid. Palestine will become an Islamic fundamentalist bastion. I myself will be accused of collaborating with the infidel, and a small caliber bullet”—Sa’adat, still smiling, tapped the bone behind his ear with a forefinger—“will be fired into the base of my skull.”

  Reading between the lines, it dawned on Baruch why they had been invited down to Jericho; the Palestinian Authority Chairman and his Preventive Security apparatus were declaring war on the blind mujaddid who had murdered twenty-three collaborators and kidnapped Rabbi Apfulbaum. They would hang Palestinians by their wrists in an effort to discover who he was and where he was. But once they found out, they would prefer it if someone else eliminated the mujaddid.

  That someone else would be the Israelis.

  “Lamma lo?” Baruch said, thinking out loud. “Why not? You find him, we’ll kill him.”

  Beaming, Sa’adat scraped back his seat and came around to the front of the desk. “This meeting never took place,” he announced. “Those who say there is an understanding between us lie through their teeth. If, by some miracle, we discover where Abu Bakr is holding the Rabbi, you will be the last to hear about it. God forbid a Muslim should denounce the mujaddid sent by Allah to renew Islam!”

  Sa’adat accompanied his guests down the sandy path to the gate in the fence. “It was cheerful to see you,” he told Baruch. “Come again when the spirit moves you. My home is your home, et cetera, et cetera.” The smile etched onto his face never wavered as he added, “Next time, do me a service and leave your famous Mossad katsa home.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (AS THEY WERE NICKNAMED IN police circles) barged without knocking into Baruch’s office. Azazel, wearing a heavy gold chain around his tanned neck and a white-on-white shirt unbuttoned down to a tanned navel, sank with an exasperated sigh onto a couch. Absalom, dressed in a custom-made pale mauve sports jacket and black trousers with knife-edge creases, planted himself in front of the desk and began reading the work order that Baruch had deposited in their in-basket.

  “‘From: Baruch.’” Absalom lifted his moist eyes from the paper clutched in his carefully manicured fingers. “That’s you.”

  “That’s him,” Azazel agreed coyly.

  “‘To: The brothers Karamazov.’ That’s us.”

  Baruch started to say something but Azazel, from the couch, whipped both hands over his head as if they were helicopter rotors. “Listen to Absalom,” he insisted shrilly. “Hear what he has to say.”

  “‘Subject: Needle in a haystack.’” Absalom pouted. “Well, at least you got that part right.” He glanced down at the work order and continued reading in a voice dripping with irony: “‘Cancel all leaves, all hands on deck.’ Oh, my, Baruch, aren’t we being nautical today. ‘I want you and Azazel and your people to comb through the records of former Palestinian prisoners. The list is obviously long—’”

  “He’s telling us that the list is long,” Azazel bitched from the couch. He rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear.”

  Absalom plunged on. “‘—obviously long, and much of it is still not available on the Shin Bet’s main frame, which means you’ll have to wade through hundreds of dusty file cabinets in the basements—but when has that fazed the brothers Karamazov?’”

  “Flattery,” Azazel sniffed from the couch, “would normally get you everywhere, but not today.”

  “‘Here’s what we’re looking for.’” Absalom flashed a vinegary smirk in Azazel’s direction. “Here’s what he’s looking for.”

  “He’s already said what he’s looking for,” Azazel fretted. “He’s looking for a needle in his haystack.”

  Absalom cleared his throat. “‘A male Palestinian, age unknown but I’m guessing he is in his forties or fifties, who (1) is short and heavy set, (2) may have been arrested after being betrayed by one of the Shin Bet’s Palestinian assets, (3) probably served major time in Israeli prisons as a result of this denunciation, (4) was in all likelihood a devout Muslim with (5) seriously enough impaired eyesight so that someone could describe
him as being nearly blind.”

  “Forty or fifty,” Azazel blurted out. “Possibly betrayed. Maybe jailed. Probably devout. Nearly blind. Well, at least he’s sure we’re looking for the male of the species!”

  The two former Russian rabbis, who had emigrated to Israel two decades earlier and now directed a small army of researchers working for the national police, batted their eyes in Baruch’s direction. Absalom and Azazel were the butt of countless office jokes, but Baruch took the position that what consenting adults did in their free time was their affair. All he cared about was that they were capable of tracking a Palestinian through the voluminous national police–Shin Bet archives on the skimpiest of leads. Only months before they had managed to identify a Nablus Arab who had thrown a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli patrol on the basis of a description limited to two details; the bomber had asthma and gnawed on his finger nails as he was waiting for the Israelis to pass.

  Baruch settled back in his chair. “Look, I’m not stupid. I know there will be dozens of short, heavy male Palestinians who were devout and suffered from bad eyesight and wound up behind bars after being denounced by a collaborator.”

  “Dozens!” Absalom corrected him. “Hundreds is more likely.”

  “If there are hundreds,” Baruch said in his crisp no-room-for-argument tone, “bring me their names. By the time you’ve narrowed it down to hundreds, I hope we’ll have another detail or two so you can narrow the list down even further.”

  NINETEEN

  SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, MAALI, SLEEPING RESTLESSLY ON a folding cot with an arm flung over her eyes to shield them from the two-hundred-watt overhead bulb, was awakened by the long, deep sobs of a woman. For a moment she thought she had been crying in her sleep. Then, through the grille, she saw Isra’ili soldiers dragging someone under the armpits along the passageway. The group came to a stop in front of Maali’s door. A key turned in the lock, the door swung open and a woman was thrown into the small cell. She collapsed onto the cement floor as the door slammed closed behind her with the brutal gnash of metal striking metal.

  Crouching next to the prisoner, Maali turned her face up and cradled her head in her lap. The woman’s dark hair was matted with sticky blood. There was a cut under an eye that was swollen shut, and an ugly purple bruise on one shoulder. Her prison shift was ripped under the armpits. Both of her knees and one ankle were scraped and bleeding. The woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties, opened her good eye and peered up at Maali in fright. “They think they can throw me into a cell with a collaborator and I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t tell them,” she whispered in Arabic. “It will not happen.”

  “I am no collaborator,” Maali said.

  “Go to hell.” The words were spit out from between sore lips.

  Maali dragged the prisoner over to the cot and wrestled her onto it. She pulled off the underwear the Jewish doctor had given her, moistened a corner with saliva and began to clean the woman’s cuts and bruises. “What is your name?” she asked after a while. “Mine is Maali. I am the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh.”

  The young woman tilted her head to get a better look at Maali. “There is a Yussuf Abu Saleh who is said to be a disciple of the mujaddid.”

  Maali smiled proudly.

  The woman said, “How can I be sure you are the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh?”

  “Because I say it. Because I am here. Because I have suffered as you have suffered.”

  Air rattled in the woman’s throat as she spoke. “I am Delilah, the sister-in-law of Abu Bakr, the mujaddid. My husband and I were pulled from our automobile as we passed through an Isra’ili roadblock on the edge of Jerusalem three days ago. I have not seen my husband since then, though I have heard his cries of pain coming from another room when they were torturing me.”

  The two woman embraced. Delilah put her mouth next to Maali’s ear and whispered, “Have you told them what they want to know?”

  “Not a word has crossed my lips,” Maali shot back. “I will die before I betray my husband.”

  The woman managed a twisted smile. “Whatever you do, tell me nothing. What I do not know I cannot pass on to the Jews if the torture becomes too much for me to bear.”

  Exhausted, Delilah sank into a fitful sleep with her head propped on Maali’s lap. At dawn the Isra’ilis came back for her. “Hatha baladna, il yahud kilabna,” the woman cried defiantly as they pulled her from the cell. “This is our country, the Jews are our dogs.”

  An hour later the door of the cell was thrown open and Delilah, bleeding from one nostril of what looked like a broken nose, stumbled in. Sobbing convulsively like a baby, she collapsed into Maali’s arms. “They are convinced I know where Abu Bakr is holding the Jewish Rabbi,” she gasped when she was finally able to talk.

  “Do you?” Maali whispered.

  Staring deeply into Maali’s eyes, Delilah nodded imperceptibly. Then she curled up on the cot and, her body jerking spastically from time to time, dozed. Every two hours or so the Isra’ilis hauled Delilah off, and dragged her back to the cell looking more beat up than before. Maali guessed the Jews were killing two birds with one stone—they were trying to beat information out of Delilah, and using Delilah to demonstrate to Maali that they weren’t fainthearted when it came to making a woman talk. Delilah was sleeping fitfully sometime in the early afternoon when Maali heard a door opening at the far end of the passageway. She shook Delilah awake. They could make out the sound of footsteps approaching. Delilah looked around wildly. “Can’t take any more,” she moaned. “I need metal, it does not have to be sharp, with which to cut my wrists.” Seeing nothing she could use, she pulled Maali roughly toward her until their foreheads were touching. “I ask you—knot a length of cloth around my neck and strangle me.”

  Maali shrank back in horror. “It is out of the realm of possibility.”

  The cell door opened. Two young Isra’ili woman soldiers, both wearing khaki miniskirts and khaki sweaters, came in. One carried a plastic basin filled with warm water. The other set a bar of soap, a towel, a pair of low-heeled shoes and a folded Arab dress on the cot. “Count your blessings,” one of the soldiers sneered in Arabic. “Palestinian lawyers have brought your case before an Israeli judge and he has ordered your release. You are free to go as soon as you clean up.”

  “And my husband?”

  “Your husband is in the hospital—he suffered a concussion when he beat his head against a wall to make it appear as if he had been tortured.”

  “You lie!”

  The young soldier shrugged. “Your lawyers are waiting outside to take you to him. Call out when you are ready to leave.”

  Maali helped Delilah wash away the dried blood and fit her aching limbs into the clean dress. The two women stood in front of the cell door and embraced. “We have only known each other for a few hours, but I think of you as a sister,” Delilah said.

  “I will never forget you,” Maali declared emotionally.

  “Do you want to send word to your husband?”

  Maali leaped at the chance. “Address a note to Tayzir the florist,” she whispered into Delilah’s ear. “Leave it with the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque in the Christian Quarter. Say I have been arrested but am holding up. Say that the Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”

  “The Isra’ilis discovered the ring and know it belonged to the dead Jew.”

  “Say I have not told them who gave it to me. Yussuf will understand.”

  Delilah turned away before Maali could embrace her again and called for the two women soldiers to open the cell door. She stepped through it and started striding down the passageway ahead of them almost as if her limbs were not in pain. A moment later she disappeared through the door at the end of the passageway.

  Around six in the evening, Maali caught the squeak of the food cart being pushed by a Palestinian orderly down the corridor. It came to a stop in front of the door of her cell and a plastic tray was slipp
ed through the slot. Maali carried it back to her bunk and looked at the food. There was a plastic bowl half filled with cold rice and pieces of chicken, a single slice of white bread, a bowl of jello. She knew that she had to force herself to eat to keep up her strength. Using the plastic spoon, she started in on the rice, then picked up the bread. Hidden under it was a rolled up cigarette paper. Maali glanced at the door, then turning her back to it, unrolled the paper and flattened it on the plastic tray. “Beware,” it said in minuscule Arabic writing. “The Jews are using a beat-up Arabic-looking woman to get prisoners to talk.”

  Her skin crawling, her blood running cold, Maali sank to the ground. “What have I done?” she moaned, and she leaned forward and began to slowly pound her forehead against the cement floor, each stroke incrementally harder than the one before.

  TWENTY

  IN THE ROOM ABOVE THE SEAFOOD RESTAURANT, THE RETIRED general named Uri poured Lagavulin whiskey neat into the six tumblers lined up on the oval table, adding a splash or two until he was satisfied all the glasses held the same amount. He passed out five of the tumblers to the members of the inter-agency Working Group, gripped the sixth in his paw and sank dejectedly onto the overstuffed couch against one wall. From his seat at the oval table, Baruch started reading out loud the police report on the Palestinian woman Maali. Prison guards had discovered her unconscious on the floor of the cell. The prison doctor had been summoned. He had noted massive injury to the forehead and dilation of the pupils of the eyes, which indicated the brain itself had been bruised by impacting against the inside of the skull; he had observed convulsions of the extremities of the limbs, which suggested the brain may have swelled, putting pressure on the cerebrum. The chief interrogator had given the doctor permission to move Maali to a nearby hospital, but had instructed him to make sure the records showed that she had been brought in to the hospital’s emergency room unconscious after a motor scooter accident and had been in a coma ever since. A surgical procedure to drain the skull cavity and relieve pressure on the brain had been performed, but the pressure had built up again rapidly. A brain scan had indicated irreversible cerebral trauma. The woman Maali had died in the intensive care unit shortly after midnight.