Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “For god’s sake, Rabbi, listen to me,” Sweeney pleaded. “Any moment now the Israeli Army is going to come bursting in—”

  Apfulbaum set his glass down on the table and ran a finger around its rim, producing a soft moan. “For me, Genesis 17:8—that’s where Allah gives Ibrahim and his seed all of the land of Canaan—is the heart of the heart of the Koran …” The Rabbi’s closed eye opened wide. He swayed drunkenly toward Sweeney. “What did you just say?” he sputtered.

  “Rabbi, I want you to stand up and walk with me, very casually, back to the back room. If the Doctor asks where we’re going, I’ll say you have to urinate.”

  The Rabbi shuddered like a wet dog coming out of the rain. “For too long we Arabs were a people without a Renewer …” His voice trailed off. He screwed up his face and asked slyly, “So how do you know they‘re going to come bursting in?”

  Sweeney checked over his shoulder again. “The sound-truck advertising the state lottery,” he whispered. “It’s a signal. It means the raid is underway.” He tugged at the Rabbi’s elbow. “They could be taping explosives to the door right now. We have to get to the back—”

  “Taping explosives,” Apfulbaum repeated. He tilted his head and chewed on the inside of a cheek. “To the door.” He thought he detected a flaw in the story. “How could they have found me?”

  “They found me!”

  Apfulbaum’s mouth sagged open, baring a set of rotting teeth. A mournful yowl emerged from the back of his throat. “Ish-ma-el!”

  Startled, the el-Tel brothers looked up from their game. The Doctor turned away from the radio. The Rabbi’s arm swept out, knocking over his glass and the pewter pot, splashing tea on the table. “The goy journalist,” he cried, his voice a raspy shriek, “is a Jewish spy. The lottery truck was a signal.” Spittle flew from his mouth as the words spilled out. He punched at Sweeney but the journalist brushed off the feeble blows. Tears began to stream down the Rabbi’s face. “Ohhhhhh, I told you this would be the last supper but you wouldn’t listen, would you? The Isra-ilis aren’t delivering any Arabs to any border. They’re on the other side of our door.”

  Sweeney swallowed hard. “He’s ranting—”

  The Doctor gestured with a forefinger. Aown pitched his ancient Webley to Petra as he and Azziz dove for the AK-47s. The Doctor barked at them in Arabic, “He says the journalist is a Jewish spy. Azziz, Petra, be quick, get them into the back room. If you hear shooting, execute them both immediately.”

  The Rabbi and Sweeney were hustled at gun point into the inner sanctum. The Doctor pressed his ear against the door and closed his eyes and listened. He motioned to Aown. “Slip out and take a look around. If the Jews are really outside, get off at least one burst to warn us. If nobody is there, sit outside with your back to the door. I’ll let you in when we’re sure the first group of prisoners has been released.”

  Stuffing two extra clips and two grenades into his pants pockets, Aown put the AK-47 on automatic, cocked it and snapped in the folding stock so he could use the weapon it as if it were a hand gun. “If I should be killed—”

  The Doctor touched Aown lightly on the forehead. “Those who fall in battle are rewarded with eternal life.”

  Aown slid back one of the bars. “Life is beautiful but the death of a martyr is more beautiful,” he whispered in a quivering voice.

  The Doctor hauled the pearl handled Beretta from his breast pocket and worked back the slide on the top of the barrel, chambering the first round. Behind him, Petra was carrying the carton filled with spare clips and grenades and gas masks into the inner sanctum. He put his ear to the door again, then nodded at Aown, who dragged back the other bar, opened the door a crack and ducked out of the hideaway. The Doctor slammed the door and drove home the bars. Hurrying into the back room, he pulled the door closed behind him and drove home the bars on that door, too. Azziz had lashed Sweeney’s feet to the legs of the heavy chair the Rabbi’s secretary had been bound in, and was fastening his wrists behind the chair with a length of wire. His head bobbing in agitation, Apfulbaum collapsed into his chair and held out his wrists. “I must have my manacles,” he groaned like a child deprived of a plaything. Petra looked at the Doctor. When he nodded, she snatched the manacles off the floor and snapped them onto his bony wrists. The Rabbi croaked in relief. Azziz dragged over the other chair. The Doctor sat down on it facing the door and laid the Beretta across his knees. Azziz, worried sick about his brother, cocked his AK-47 and settled back against the Gaza Central Import-Export Bank calendar. Petra spun the cylinder on the Webley, checking to make sure it was loaded, then cocked the pistol and, gripping it with both hands, sank onto the floor with her spine against the wall.

  “Gar-dens of Eee-den,” the Rabbi sang under his breath in the ethereal voice of a choir boy, “un-der-neath which ri-vers flow.”

  FORTY-NINE

  HIS FINGER CARESSING THE COLD TRIGGER OF THE AK-47, AOWN drropped to one knee at the top of the narrow staircase. He had been through every nook and cranny of the building, in the pitch darkness, many times, and knew it as he knew the alleyways of Abu Dis, the Palestinian suburb of East Jerusalem in which he’d been raised. He bent forward and listened to the hollow emptiness of the bathhouse below. In his mind’s eye, he tried to imagine what paradise would be like. Would the beautiful gardens, where the tears of his mother were transformed into roses and jasmine, have different flowers at different seasons? Would the flowing rivers dry up like wadis in the summer? Would there be different seasons? Would the sky cloud over? Would there be thunderstorms or never ending sunshine? If never ending sunshine, would the heavenly mansion of perpetual bliss have a roof? Would his skin turn black like an African’s? He himself loved the way dogs curled their tails between their hind legs and cringed under beds at each bolt of lightning, and the damp breath of the cool air on his cheek after a summer thunderstorm. The eternal life that awaited him, so promised the mujaddid, Abu Bakr, would clearly not disappoint him. The more so if he were to die a martyr. But if there were no bone-dry summers, and no thunderstorms …

  Aown’s eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. Hugging the wall he started down the narrow flight of stairs. Several of them creaked under his feet. He stopped half way down to listen again. Somewhere in the labyrinth of cubicles a rat scuffed over the cracked tiles of the floors. A shutter slapped lightly against an inside wall. Could it be that the American journalist had somehow led the Jews to the bathhouse? The fact that the Doctor, whom Aown considered infallible, had sent him to scout meant that it was a genuine possibility. He must be careful not to jump at shadows, lest he alarm the people in the neighborhood and give away the location of the safe-house. But he would fire off all thirty rounds in the clip at the first human body that stirred. Stealing down the steps, crouched low, swinging his AK-47 in a wide arc at each doorway, Aown began working his way through the maze of tiled baths. He lingered at the top of one of the two wide staircases leading to the ground floor and listened. He could almost make out the evening breeze whispering through the warren of corridors and changing rooms under his feet.

  Peering into the dark emptiness, Aown started down the stairs. One by one he explored the changing rooms, with their doors hanging half off their hinges, their ceramic hooks long since pried from the walls by souvenir hunters scavenging through the abandoned building. Turning down one corridor, he could make out the high double door of the enormous reception room looming ahead. Sinking onto one knee with his back to the wall on the corridor-side of the double door, he peered into the darkness and listened again, then wheeled around the corner and lunged across the threshold into the room, landing on a small mountain of soft coarse fabric that had not been there the last time he had passed. Climbing to his feet, he kicked at the fabric with his shoe and groped for a shred of logic to explain its presence. Who would have stored cloth in the bathhouse, where anyone could sneak in and steal it? As his thoughts raced, a ghost-like luminous streak floated out of the darkness in front of hi
m. In the blink of an eye the shadow transformed itself into a goggled human figure and a long soot-blackened grooved commando blade slipped between Aown’s scapula and rib, severing the pulmonary artery of his heart. There was no pain, only a sudden and total loss of muscle strength as hands reached out of the blackness to lower him noiselessly to the ground. Aown actually felt his spirit floating free of his body as many feet raced past him. As the blackness turned into blinding brilliance, the answer came to him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it before? Not a phrase, not a word in the holy Qur’an was there by chance. The angel Jibril had not whispered into the Messenger’s ear the words Garden of Eden, but Gardens. Which surely meant there was one Garden with never ending sunshine, and another for those, like Aown, who loved the crack of summer lightning and the damp breath of the cool air on their cheeks after a thunderstorm.

  FIFTY

  IN THE INNER SANCTUM, THE MINUTES CREPT BY WITH THE SPEED of measuring worms. When he wasn’t staring at the reinforced door as if he could see through it, Azziz would glance at his watch. He imagined his brother stealing through the tangle of corridors and rooms on the first two floors of the building. If there were Jews hiding down there in the darkness, Aown would smell them; he would skid a grenade into one of the changing rooms and leap through a back window and escape through the maze of dark alleyways.

  And still no sound came from the bowels of the bathhouse. “He is gone eight minutes,” Azziz finally announced.

  Petra lowered her pistol. “If there are Isra’ilis in the building,” she said in a low voice, “Aown would have come across them by now.”

  “I tell you he was ranting,” Sweeney insisted from the heavy chair.

  “Takes two to tango,” the Rabbi fretted, kneading the silver worry beads. “I have it on good authority that you can’t have a vicious circle unless both parties hold up their end.”

  “Isaac, precisely what exactly did the journalist tell you?” the Doctor demanded.

  His bulging eyes fixed on the single bulb dangling from the ceiling, the Rabbi sucked on one of the worry beads. After a moment he replied, “We met on the no-man’s land of English. He said the sound-truck was a signal. He said the raid was underway. I asked him how the Isra’ilis had found me. He said they had found him. Un-der-neath which ri-vers flow, lah di dah.”

  Sweeney fidgeted in the chair. “Can’t you see he’s deranged?”

  “How is it possible for Sweeney to have led the Isra’ilis to us?” the Doctor asked in Arabic. He addressed Petra. “You are sure you were not followed when you brought him here?”

  “We took the usual precautions,” she said. “That is out of the realm of possibility.”

  “I destroyed his camera and his cellular phone and his wrist watch,” Azziz said. “I destroyed even the spare rolls of film.”

  “The only thing we did not destroy was the device in his ear,” Petra said.

  The Doctor remembered Sweeney’s description of his hearing disability. I suffered a concussion and damage to the middle ear of my left ear—there was some kind of injury to a membrane.

  Was it the tympanic membrane?

  That rings a bell.

  The Doctor moved to the door and rubbed his bruised forehead against the steel plating. The coolness calmed the migraine lurking behind his eyes. “Break open the hearing aid,” he ordered with a sigh, “and tell me what you see.”

  Petra leaped to her feet and snatched the small plastic button out of Sweeney’s ear. She set it on the floor and smashed it with the butt of her Webley and sifted through the pieces. “There is micro-circuitry with what looks like minute transistors. There is a tiny speaker, a round wafer-thin battery.”

  Sweeney’s wrists strained at the wires behind his back.

  The Doctor frowned. “The circuitry could be transmitting a signal—”

  “I checked the hearing aid with my meter,” Petra reminded him.

  “It could be programmed to transmit in short bursts at intervals. If you failed to test it when it was actually transmitting …” The Doctor had another idea. “Petra, fetch the otoscope from my medical valise in the corner. You can’t miss it, it’s an instrument for looking into ears. You flick the switch in the handle to turn on the light. I want you to look in his bad ear and tell me precisely what you see.”

  As Petra approached Sweeney, he angled his head away. Azziz came over and jammed the muzzle of his AK-47 into Sweeney’s good ear. Kneeling next to Sweeney, Petra fitted the end of the otoscope into his left ear and switched on the light. Leaning forward, she closed one eye and peered into the instrument with the other. “I see three jagged-shaped holes in what looks like a membrane. Two are big enough to pass a pencil through. They are rimmed with white scar tissue. The membrane itself is grayish-brown and covered with crusts. There is a tiny pearl—white and glistening and hard—near one of the perforations.”

  “That will be a subepithelial pearl of cholesteatoma. Continue.”

  “Through one of the holes in the membrane I can see a small white bulb-shaped object—it looks not unlike the eatable end of a spring onion. It seems to be floating—”

  “That will be the head of the stapes,” the Doctor announced triumphantly in English. “It will have been detached in the Beirut explosion you talk about, Mr. Sweeney. Which means your left ear is permanently dead—the hearing aid you wear is not there to augment your hearing because, with a floating stapes, there is no possibility of sound being transmitted to the inner ear.” The Doctor switched back to Arabic. “I blame myself—I should have thought of it before. His hearing device must be programmed to send a signal.” He spoke again in English. “How often does it broadcast?” he asked Sweeney.

  Sweeney drew a quivering breath. The Israelis would break through the outer door at any instant; his only chance was to respond to the Doctor’s questions and hope he asked more of them. “I was told there would be five signals, each lasting a tenth of a second, at eighteen minutes to the hour and eighteen minutes past.”

  “What is the range of the signal?”

  “Depending on whether it’s broadcasting from inside or outside, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty meters.”

  “Excarnate him, excarnate him, for God’s sake,” the Rabbi whimpered, his feet dancing in agitation. “Betrayed us, deserves death. Don’t spell his name right in the Book of Deeds. Ship him out to the burning fiery furnace, DOA in Gehenna.”

  Sweeney, faint with terror, closed his eyes. His breath, suddenly sour, came in shallow gasps. Bile rose to the back of his throat. He was bone-weary and drained of energy. It had been a long hard road from Seattle to Beirut to Israel. His luck, which had been running for him when the mortar shell landed next to his car in Beirut, had run out in a shabby bricked-in room on the third floor of an abandoned Jerusalem bathhouse. The only thing really surprising was that it had lasted as long as it did.

  “Shoot him,” the Doctor instructed Azziz.

  Grabbing a pillow off the cot to dampen the noise, Azziz angled the AK-47 and flicked it onto single shot and motioned with his chin for Petra to step away. As she backed toward the cot, the Rabbi repeated the order. “What are you waiting for? Excarnate the son of a—”

  He was interrupted by a series of muted dry explosions—it sounded as if a string of Chinese New Year’s firecrackers had gone off in a distant room. The reinforced front door to the hideaway, blown neatly off its hinges and bolts, slammed inward onto the tiled floor. Men grunted as they flooded in. Azziz sank to one knee behind Sweeney and sucked in his breath and flicked his weapon back onto automatic and aimed it at the door. Petra plucked the Webley off the cot and flattened herself against the back wall. The acrid stench of nitroglycerine seeped under the door. The Doctor, shaken, crouched next to the Rabbi.

  “Do what you have sworn to do, ya’ani,” Apfulbaum goaded him. “Think of my death as my modest contribution to our vicious circle.”

  Through the reinforced thickness of the door, a hard voice sp
eaking through a bullhorn declared in English, “We know you are in there, Doctor al-Shaath. If you want to save your life, as well as the lives of your comrades, do not kill the Rabbi, do not kill the journalist. We will exchange their lives for yours and those of your compatriots who are with you.”

  “The light bulb,” the Doctor whispered.

  Azziz came around under the dangling bulb and, gripping it with a handkerchief, unscrewed it. The room was plunged into a tunnel-like blackness.

  “I know you can hear me, Doctor al-Shaath. We are all soldiers here. Let us talk soldier to soldier. We can respect a soldier who fights on the opposing side as long as he doesn’t execute defenseless people.”

  “They are putting explosives on the door,” Apfulbaum warned. “For God’s sake, Ishmael, shoot me before we both lose our nerve.”

  In the perfect darkness, the Doctor started to feel for the knob of bone behind his prisoner’s ear. “I have lost my way,” he breathed. “I can no longer distinguish the straight path.”

  “I will lead you down it,” the Rabbi told him.

  “Rabbi Apfulbaum, Mister Sweeney,” the voice of the bullhorn called. “Call out if you are still able to.” Someone else shouted over the bullhorn in Arabic, “If you want to live, do not harm the Rabbi and the American journalist. If you kill them, make no mistake about it, we will kill you.”

  “What did you do to my brother?” Azziz screamed.

  “The one who came down the stairs surrendered without a struggle,” the voice answered in Arabic. “He is alive and well and has been taken prisoner.”

  “You lie through your teeth!” Azziz screamed through tears of rage.

  “Ishmael, I can tell you now,” the Rabbi confided urgently. “I’m not the spiritual leader of the Jewish underground group Keshet Yonathan. I am the leader. It’s me who tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock Mosque. It’s me who sent those letter bombs to Arab mayors. It’s me who excarnated those Arabs at Hebron’s Islamic College. It’s me, Ya’ir!”