Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  Sa’adat sank back in his chair and eyed his guest. “We are strange bedfellows, you and me, Baruch.”

  “How so?”

  “Neither of us would collaborate with the other if we had a choice.” Sa’adat glanced at a very large wrist watch. “On the other hand we harbor no illusions, which makes for a successful collaboration.”

  “It’s true I harbor no illusions about you,” Baruch agreed. “I would have less qualms about a Palestinian state if people like you weren’t going to run it.”

  “You Jews always prefer to think you sold your souls to the devil than consider the alternative—that you are the devil.”

  Baruch tossed his head in disgust; Sa’adat couldn’t have known it but the person he was disgusted with was himself. “Our struggle to keep our heads above water in this sea of Arabs has changed us—some would say corrupted us. We are not the same people we would have been if we had accepted the British suggestion to make the Jewish state in Uganda.”

  Sa’adat decided to change the subject. “Abu Bakr’s deadline for the Rabbi’s secretary approaches.”

  “We can count as well as you.” Pushing himself out of the chair, Baruch leaned over Sa’adat’s desk and scratched a phone number on a pad. “That’s a direct line. I’m sleeping in the office these days. Call me if Abu Saleh talks.”

  Sa’adat closed his eyes. “I will call you when Abu Saleh talks,” he said softly.

  At the door Sa’adat took Baruch’s elbow and said, “By the way, I have a gift for you. It is in Arabic. Do you read Arabic?”

  “Only matrimonial advertisements.”

  Sa’adat handed Baruch a slip of paper. “We found it folded into Abu Saleh’s wallet. It is a curious document. It even bears a number—seven. My people are unable to figure out what he was doing with it, unless of course it is a coded message.” As Baruch scanned the paper Sa’adat started back toward his desk, then turned on his heel. “Incidentally, there has been a twenty-fourth execution of a collaborator—a Mr. Hajji, who used to change money and guard valises for tourists at the Damascus Gate. He was killed with a .22-caliber bullet fired at point blank range into the base of his skull behind the ear. The family claimed Mr. Hajji died of heart failure and tried to bury him quietly to avoid disgrace. We got wind of it and had an autopsy performed.” A shrewd smirk spread across Sa’adat’s fat face. “You are not the only one to keep your ear to the soil, my friend.”

  “It was Mr. Hajji who spotted Yussuf Abu Saleh’s wife waving to her husband at the Damascus Gate,” Baruch said quietly. “Where did his murder take place?”

  “Somewhere in the state of Palestine.”

  Baruch sniffed at the warm dry air outside the door. “There is no state of Palestine.”

  Sa’adat lifted his eyebrows. “In less than a week there will be.”

  When Abu Saleh’s hour of respite was up, Sa’adat returned to the interrogation chamber. “Have you seen the light?” he asked the prisoner.

  Abu Saleh, who was on his knees and urinating into a plastic bucket, looked up. “My name is Koskovic, Asaf,” he groaned, his swollen lips barely moving. “You have arrested the wrong man.”

  Sa’adat tossed his bald head in the direction of the hook on the wall. “String him up,” he ordered the policemen.

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  As the story won’t become public for another twenty-five years, I suppose there’s no harm in my telling you what happened. This turned out to be the fist time in my life I was ever involved in one of those cloak-and-dagger meetings that you read about in spy novels. The Air Force, listing me on the manifest (someone in operations has a nice sense of humor) as Commander Philip Francis Queeg, flew me to Paris in one of their transports. The CIA whisked me through a gate at Le Bourget and the two armed policemen on duty, instead of asking for a passport, actually saluted. In the early hours before dawn, an embassy car drove me through the deserted boulevards to 37 Rue de la Ferme in Neuilly. Two young men with crew cuts and tiny plastic contraptions in their ears were waiting to take me to a fourth-floor safehouse. The apartment was furnished in CIA modern: cameras were hidden behind two-way mirrors, microphones were concealed in bouquets of plastic flowers. The metal shutters looked as if they had been welded closed. Finger sandwiches and a pitcher of apple juice had been set out on the table.

  At the stroke of five a fiery woman named Lamia Ghuri appeared at the door. We settled down around the small table and I poured out two glasses of apple juice and handed her one.

  “To your health,” I said, raising my glass.

  Madame Ghuri was a stocky women with a gorgeous face. I knew from my briefing paper that she was forty-two, the only daughter of a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother; that as a young woman she had studied Russian history and Marxism at the Sorbonne; that she was married to a mysterious Lebanese who had supplied Russian surplus arms and explosives to laic Palestinian splinter groups until the Authority, under American pressure, cracked down on them and him; that she was considered by left wing Palestinian radicals to be their Passionaria.

  She raised her glass and clanked it against mine. “L’chaim,” she replied, a mischievous glint in her dark eyes.

  I was somewhat taken aback and said so. “The last thing I expected was for a Palestinian like you to come out with a toast in Hebrew.”

  “Our argument is not with the Hebrew language or the Jews who use it, Mr. Sawyer,” she retorted. “It is with the Zionist colonialists who have taken our land from us, who have humiliated our people; who now, aided and abetted by the Palestinian Authority, which has been backed into a corner by the American President, expect us to be thankful for the crumbs they throw us.”

  “You will finally get your state,” I said. “You will get back roughly ninety-four percent of the land that Israel seized in the 1967 Six-day War. Most of the settlements on the West Bank will either be dismantled or, if the Jews choose to remain, come under Palestinian rule. That doesn’t sound like crumbs to me.”

  Lamia Ghuri flashed a very thin smile that, to my astonishment, was filled with mirth, almost as if she were reacting to a joke. “Perspective is everything,” is what she told me. “We are being given sovereignty over something like twenty-five percent of the pre-1948 Palestine. We are being given control of but not sovereignty over the Temple Mount, with its holy mosques. We are getting far less than half the water even though the water table runs under our cities and towns on the West Bank. We have had to tell the three and a half million Palestinian refugees that they will not be permitted to return to their homes in Israel. We have been obliged to agree to limit the weapons that we import into our state and cede control of the air space over the state to the Isra’ilis. All this sounds suspiciously like crumbs to me.”

  “The Palestinians you speak for have agreed to accept these terms—”

  “I speak for no one but myself and my husband.”

  “If I thought that were true I wouldn’t have come all this way to see you.”

  “Believe that it is true because I tell you that it is true.”

  I must have taken a very deep breath because that’s what I usually do when I’m confronted by a boldface lie delivered with utter sincerity. “Okay. You speak for yourself and for your husband. Still, the position you and your husband have taken on the matter of the peace treaty—despite your reservations—has had an enormous influence with certain elements among the Palestinians.”

  “Some have suggested that this is the case. I myself have no way of confirming it.”

  “Let’s move past the question of the Mt. Washington peace treaty, which has been settled. Let’s talk about this Abu Bakr fellow. Let’s talk about his abduction of that Rabbi—”

  She supplied the name when she saw I couldn’t remember it. “I. Apfulbaum.”

  “I. Apfulbaum. It’s my understanding that you and your husband might not be averse to using what little influence you have—” I managed to keep a straight f
ace when I pronounced the words “little influence”—“under the right conditions.”

  She deployed that thin smile of hers and waited for me to continue.

  “Abu Bakr, whoever he is, does not have the profile of a Palestinian patriot, which is to say he couldn’t care less if there is a secular Palestinian state run by elected representatives who answer to the people. What he wants is an Islamic state in an Islamic Middle East run by mullahs who answer only to God. I have been led to believe”—I was quoting here from the top-secret CIA report that had sent me on my quest to meet Lamia Ghuri—”that you and your husband, along with many of your husband’s former clients, would feel out of place in an Islamic state; would, in fact, be the first to be jailed, perhaps even executed, by the leaders of an Islamic state who wanted to set an example by punishing prominent laic personalities. This is what the ayatollahs did when they took over Iran. This is what the Taliban did in Afghanistan.”

  “Your analysis of the situation is self-serving,” she remarked. And she added a quote she said came from the Koran: “‘ Justifying yourself will not bring you camels in reward.’”

  “Because it is self-serving doesn’t make it any less true.”

  All through my (I have to admit) well rehearsed presentation, Lamia Ghuri had been looking me straight in the eye. Now, for the first time, her gaze drifted away and the thin smile that seemed to be a permanent fixture on her lips faded. She suddenly looked a good deal older than her forty-two years and I caught a glimpse of the strain that people like her lived under. When she finally spoke, she seemed a lot less sure of herself.

  “If we knew who he was we would make sure the information reached you. If it was within our power to stop him before he kills Rabbi Apfulbaum, we would do it.”

  I nodded fatalistically. Lamia Ghuri had been a long shot. But the stakes were high and we couldn’t afford to leave a stone unturned. I pushed the plate of finger sandwiches across the table, but she ignored them. “Thank you for agreeing to this meeting,” I said, but her mind was obviously elsewhere. She sat there breathing very quietly for what seemed like an eternity. I don’t know why but I got the impression that she was arguing with herself, which is—here I speak from personal experience—always a no-win situation. Finally she nodded and scraped the chair away from the table and stood up, very straight, her shoulders squared, her head high and angled slightly to one side. (I remember all these details because I watched the scene on film after she’d left.)

  “He’s a medical doctor,” she said softly.

  I’m have to admit that I didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. “Who’s a medical doctor?” I asked stupidly.

  “Abu Bakr. In the territories, it is said that he with the mark of prostration on his forehead is a medical doctor.”

  I climbed to my feet. “Why didn’t you tell me this straight away?”

  There was a hint of tears in her eyes as she said, “It is not easy to betray a Palestinian, even one whose vision of a Palestinian state would set it back centuries. Creating a Palestinian state is only the beginning of the struggle for many of us. Pulling it out of the fundamentalist swamp and into the twenty-first century is our ultimate goal. Goodbye, Mr. Sawyer. I do not like Americans. I do not like your President. I do not like you. I hope we never meet again.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  MOSES BRISCOE, THE IRISH JEW WHO RAN ONE OF THE SHIN Bet’s flagship divisions, was fuming. Baruch, who had a passing acquaintance with Briscoe—they had crossed swords before when both were assigned to investigate back-to-back Hamas suicide bombings—could hear him biting off his words over the phone. “Let’s scramble this conversation,” Briscoe, nominally higher in the security apparatus pecking order than a cop from Jerusalem, snapped. The Irishman came back on the line breathing fire. “I’m calling about the American journalist Sweeney—”

  “What’s Sweeney have to do with—”

  “I had his phone tapped—”

  “You had author—”

  “I have a blanket authorization to tap the phone of anyone who might lead us to terrorists.”

  “Last I heard, Sweeney was a journalist.”

  “This guy is an Arab lover.”

  “That doesn’t make him a Jew hater.”

  “He got a phone call from an Arab speaking in English—”

  “How’d you know it was an Arab if he was speaking English?”

  “An Arab can speak Mandarin Chinese, I still know he’s an Arab. He told Sweeney to come down to Aza for a scoop—we figure he was being invited to interview the man himself.”

  For once Baruch didn’t respond.

  “Did you hear me? The man himself is Abu Bakr, the mechabel who kidnapped I. Apfulbaum! According to the article Sweeney wrote after his trip to Aza, Abu Bakr may also be the celebrated Renewer.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Sweeney was supposed to find a welcoming committee on the Palestinian side of the Erez crossing point into Aza. I had some assets spotted around waiting to tail him once he made contact with his Palestinian driver. Sweeney must have parked his car in the lot on the Israeli side of the Erez crossing because we found it there. But he never showed up on the Arab side. He vanished into thin air.”

  Baruch’s pulse was pounding in his temple. “Listen carefully, Moses,” he murmured icily into the phone. “Whatever you do, don’t interrupt me. When I finish saying what I’m going to say, I’m going to hang up. Then I’m going to put in a call to the katsa. Elihu will phone up the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee, a son-of-a-bitch named Zalman Cohen. Within fifteen minutes, you will receive a personal phone call from the Prime Minister. He is going to tell you exactly what I am telling you now, only less politely. Get off Sweeney’s case. Don’t tap his phone, don’t waste assets keeping track of him, don’t ask questions, don’t argue. You’re walking on the katsa’s toes. Back-pedal before you get pulverized in the katsa’s grinder. You mention the name Sweeney once more, you’ll be out on the street hunting for a job. In another country.”

  Briscoe could be heard breathing hard, as if he had run across a back lawn to take the call. When he spoke he seemed to be wrestling with his rage. “I resent your tone, not to mention—”

  Baruch cut the connection with his forefinger, waited for a dial tone, then punched in a Jaffa number. The barefoot contessa in the miniskirt who forgot to buy diet cream put him through to the katsa. They scrambled and Baruch quickly explained the situation. “I’ll get through to the Prime Minister’s office right away,” Elihu said.

  Baruch said, “We had assets spotted around the Palestinian end of Erez too—they didn’t notice Briscoe’s assets, they didn’t notice Sweeney, either.”

  “There were twelve thousand Palestinian workers returning to Aza when Sweeney came through. The Abu Bakr people timed it so he would be lost in the shuffle.”

  Baruch knew the katsa well enough to understand that he was trying to convince himself, and not succeeding. “It’s been almost twenty-four hours,” Baruch said. “Our antennas should have picked something up by now.”

  “Aza is a big place,” Elihu said softly, and he hung up.

  Baruch ordered in a sandwich and a beer, and reread the most recent letter from his son, who was hiking with friends through the Himalayas to celebrate the completion of his three-year stint in the Army. “If we can buy bottles of oxygen from the sherpas,” Ami had written, “we’re going to try to get up to six thousand meters. Otherwise we’ll stay at four thousand and enjoy the view, which is almost as good as the one from our Mt. Hermon. For god’s sake don’t worry. I won’t do anything you wouldn’t have done at my age. (That leaves me a lot of leeway!)”

  Baruch had to smile. At Ami’s age, he’d taken part in one war and half a dozen raids across the Jordan, then had worked his way around the Horn on a tramp steamer to spend six months hiking through Thailand and Laos. He had left Israel vaguely thinking he might never return. (Almost every Israeli who
went abroad toyed with the idea of staying abroad, though very few actually did.) Who needed to spend his life in a pressure cooker? Foreigners, Baruch told himself, not for the first time, didn’t understand the strain that’s put on Israelis from the day of their birth. Israelis are born old and age fast. They feel the weight on their shoulders while they’re still crawling around a crib. Baruch swiveled a hundred and eighty degrees and gazed out the window at Jewish Jerusalem; from his office, which was on the fourteenth floor, he could make out the black scar on the pavement where a suicide bomber had blown up a number eighteen bus, killing twenty-six Jews and wounding half a hundred others. We live on the edge, Baruch thought, surrounded by dozens of millions of people who would exterminate us if they could. It is this aspect of the conflict that the world doesn’t grasp, but we understand in our gut; it is drummed into us from the moment we are taught, in kindergarten, to duck under our desks and cover our heads when the siren sounds. My daughter understood it when she was waiting for her bus at Beit Lid; my son understands it when he climbs higher and higher in the Himalayas and tries, for a day or two, to leave the world behind him. Our enemies don’t want to conquer us. They want to obliterate us. Which leaves us no margin for errors: in the wars, in the fight against terrorism, in weapons procurement, in budget allocation, in the endless diplomatic haggling. Every day we make thousands of choices, and they must be the right choices if we don’t want to wind up victims of a second Holocaust. By the time a young Israeli finishes his Army service, he is fed up with making choices that absolutely have to be correct; he wants the luxury of making a mistake now and then, and then doubling back on his tracks and casually correcting it.

  This is the weight on our shoulders that we cannot shrug off.

  Baruch took a deep breath, and a second. Then he shook his head and laughed under his breath and opened the slip of paper that Sa’adat had found in Yussuf Abu Saleh’s wallet. He was completely mystified by the small number seven inked in on the top right. Was this page seven? Or the seventh copy of the same page? One of the bright young Arabists down the hall had given Baruch a rough translation of the document, which appeared to be a textbook description of a cell in the human nervous system. There is the body of the cell, where all the cell’s activity originates. Then come the dendrites, which branch out from the cell body. Then the axon, the long single fiber that snakes out toward other nerve cells and along which instructions to the other cells are carried. There is no actual 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.