Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  Gnawing on the stem of his unlit pipe, Elihu prowled back and forth behind her as she filed away at a hang nail. The screen lit up again with random five-letter groups beamed down to the antennas on the Jaffa roof, via an American communications satellite, from mobile unit 16. A moment later, as the barefoot contessa copied the random groups of letters onto the software program, the plain language text appeared below.

  “F-a-l-s-e c-o-n-t-a-c-t d-u-e v-e-h-i-c-l-e p-a-s-s-i-n-g P-a-l-is-t-i-n-e A-u-t-h-o-r-i-t-y r-a-d-i-o t-o-w-e-r n-o j-o-y r-e-p-e-a-t n-o j-o-y.”

  The katza was on the phone moments later. “You’ve heard about the Rabbi’s secretary?” he asked Baruch over the scrambled line.

  “I caught it on CNN. They said something about an anonymous phone call to the Palestinian police leading to the discovery of the body. Hang on—the autopsy report is coming through.” Baruch came back on the line. “The murder has Abu Bakr’s signature—the cause of death was a .22-caliber bullet fired directly into the base of the skull.”

  “The mobile units reported in eighteen minutes before the hour. No joy. Not a peep. Something has gone very wrong.”

  “Sweeney’s not in Aza,” Baruch said flatly.

  The katza wasn’t ready to let go yet. “The person who phoned Sweeney instructed him to come to Aza. Then we found his car parked at the entrance to Aza.”

  “I played our tape of the conversation on Sweeney’s cell phone again. The Arab who phoned told him to take the Beit Shemesh-Kiryat Gat road down to Aza. I could kick myself for not seeing it before. What did they care how he went to Aza as long as he got there?”

  “You think they flagged him down somewhere along the way and whisked him off in another direction, and then drove his car down to Erez for us to find.”

  “It’s possible.” Baruch corrected himself with a bitter laugh. “It’s probable.”

  The katza let this sink in. “If you’re right, if Sweeney’s not in Aza, that means the Rabbi’s not in Aza.”

  “Abu Bakr’s been planting clues with Aza written all over them since the kidnapping,” Baruch said. “The Aza bank calendar we discovered on the wall, the kidnapper dressed in a short sleeved shirt, the Mercedes with the dead mechabel in the back, the cassette mailed from an Aza post office—everything pointed to Aza. Then Sweeney is invited to Aza—they took it for granted we’d be tapping his phones—and conveniently parks his car at the Erez crossing where we can find it. Now Efrayim’s body turns up on a garbage dump outside Aza City.”

  “If they could smuggle the Mercedes with the mechabel back into Aza after the kidnapping, I suppose they could smuggle Efrayim—alive and drugged, or dead and stuffed into a sack—into Aza.”

  “All roads were meant to lead to Aza,” Baruch plunged on. The more he talked, the more he became convinced he was right. “Which meant we’d jump to the logical conclusion that the Rabbi wasn’t in Aza. Then we’d smile our superior smiles and assume we were supposed to jump to this conclusion, and decide he was in Aza after all. But Abu Bakr was always one jump ahead of us.”

  “If the Rabbi isn’t in Aza, it would explain the no-joy from the mobile units. My God, the Rabbi could be anywhere in Judea or Samaria,” Baruch reminded himself. “Where do we start? Nablus? Hebron? Jenin? Tulkarm? Or one of the four hundred and sixty Palestinian villages between them? We don’t have enough mobile units to check out an area that size.”

  “There’s still Yussuf Abu Saleh,” Baruch reminded Elihu from his Jerusalem office.

  “I hate Sa’adat’s guts,” the katsa growled from Jaffa. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think he’s on our side. But let’s hope he gets Abu Saleh to talk. It may be our last shot at finding Apfulbaum before the Feast of the Breaking of the Fast.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS SA’ADAT’S “TECHNICIANS” HAD BEEN AVOIDING the deputy chief’s eye when he wandered into the interrogation chamber, a scented handkerchief delicately pressed to his mouth and nose as the overhead fan stirred the stench that emanated from festering wounds and loose bowels. The doctor who monitored Yussuf’s pulse and heartbeat was recommending longer and longer periods of repose and allowing the technicians shorter and shorter working sessions, as they were called. As a result Sa’adat’s specialists felt obliged to crowd a lot of “questioning” into the little time they were permitted with the prisoner. “Abu Bakr has abandoned you,” one of them would whisper in Yussuf’s ear. “Why do you go through hell for him?”

  “You have everything to gain, nothing to lose, by giving us the information we seek.”

  “The Palestinian Authority punishes enemies and rewards friends.”

  “Wise up. Don’t ruin your life for a scoundrel like Abu Bakr.”

  “I am Koskovic, Asaf … a Bosnian … mistaken iden—”

  The interrogator nodded at the man nearest the door, who tripped the switch, closing the electric circuit. The electrodes attached to Yussuf’s testicles hummed. He gagged on the pain as his bruised body danced grotesquely in the air, then, as the current was cut, sagged back and down onto the manacled wrists attached to the hook in the wall. Yussuf shrieked as the weight of his body pulled on his dislocated shoulder. The doctor, his face a mask of professional disinterest, checked the pulse and heart and, with a gesture, ordered the prisoner to be taken down from the wall. When Sa’adat came by a quarter of an hour later he found Yussuf stretched out on the cement of the floor, his eyes fixed on the overhead fan as he sucked short noisy doses of air through his tightly clenched teeth. Sa’adat kept the handkerchief pressed to his mouth and nose as he leaned over the prisoner.

  “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.

  THIRTY-NINE

  ELIHU 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.

  FORTY

  ABSALOM 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.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE 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 voi
ce.

  “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.”