Vicious Circle

by Robert Littell

  “I do not believe you, ya’ani. You are saying this in order to provoke me into shooting you.”

  “I swear it, as God is my witness.” Apfulbaum’s voice broke with emotion. “Only bring me a stack of bibles, I will swear it in a way that will convince you.”

  Sweeney’s brittle words echoed through the dark room. “I believe him.”

  The Rabbi’s fingers wrapped themselves around the Doctor’s wrist. “Ishmael, kinsman, cousin, brother, let us collaborate on my death,” he pleaded, his mouth bone dry, his voice taut. “Let us, you and me together, shipwreck this stinking peace treaty before the crazy politicians can sign it.” He had difficulty finding the right words, difficulty spitting them out once he found them. “Don’t you see it? The Messiah alone, the Renewer alone are less than blades of grass in a pasture. But together we can generate a windstorm that will destroy the peace process. My God, the khamsin from the furnace of hell will be nothing compared. Think vicious circle, Ishmael—kill me and my people will take revenge for my death, then your people will take revenge for the revenge.” Apfulbaum bared his teeth as a giggle made its way up from his gut. He could feel the Doctor wavering. “You abducted me, you brought the goy journalist here in order to back yourself into a corner. You invited a witness so that your identity would be known; so that the story would end in martyrdom. For me. For you. It’s the ultimate hejira, the ultimate retreat from unbelief. Ishmael, Ishmael, even with tunnel vision you ought to be able to see the straight path. If you can’t live in an Islamic state governed by Islamic law and the example of the Prophet, if I can’t live in a Jewish state governed by the Torah and the example of our prophets, let’s seek religious asylum together in Paradise and sit with the Prophets and Kings and Caliphs. Let’s join the martyrs at the right hand of God. You and me, Ishmael, the Islamic Renewer and the Jewish Messiah, side by side. A real simcha, a real joy.”

  And still the Doctor could not bring himself to shoot his friend. “I cannot take your life, Isaac. You are a kafir, an infidel who rejects the message of Islam. You will be condemned to everlasting hell, where the bodies of the damned are doused in sheets of fire, where their faces are scalded with molten copper. How can I do this to you?”

  “Doctor al-Shaath, your time is running out. Open the door and step out with your hands over your head and we will treat you as prisoners of war. No harm will come to you.”

  When another voice repeated the message in Arabic, Azziz said in a savage whisper, “My only wish is to kill many Jews before I die.”

  “Ishmael, I have the solution to our little problem,” the Rabbi said quickly. “Because of our common belief in one God, the Epistle on Martyrdom of the Rebbe Moses ben Maimon permits Jews to save their lives by converting to Islam. How could it have escaped me! If a Jew can convert to Islam to avoid death, he can convert to avoid life!”

  “You would actually convert—”

  The Rabbi began rocking back and forth in his chair in the traditional Jewish posture of prayer as he recited the shahada, the Muslim confession of faith that is said when converting to Islam and at the moment of death: “Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah”—“I bear witness that there is no God besides Allah, I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.” Apfulbaum bent his head as if bowing to God. Tears of ecstasy flooded his eyes. “My Lord has guided me to a straight path, a right religion, the creed of Ibrahim … my living, my dying belong to God.”

  Sweeney whispered, “You are both loony.”

  “Doctor al-Shaath, this is your last warning—”

  The Doctor’s fingers, working furiously, located the knob of bone behind the Rabbi’s ear. He brought the Beretta up and breathed twice on the tip of the barrel to warm it, then touched it to the spot under the bone. “If you had been born into the Qur’an,” he murmured in Hebrew into the Rabbi’s ear, “you would have been my brother.”

  The Rabbi, his sightless eyes burning with fever, responded in Arabic. “If we had read Torah together in Brooklyn,” he moaned in a child’s voice, “you would have been family.”

  The Beretta coughed up its bullet. The Rabbi, instantly brain dead, collapsed into Abu Bakr’s arm. The Doctor accepted the weight as if it were a gift from God. “Before the day is done,” he whispered, “you will be in the holy of holies of the Third Temple, you will pronounce the unpronounceable name of God that only the most pious are permitted to—”

  FIFTY-ONE

  IN THE WAR ROOM OFF THE PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE, THE WELL of conversation had long since run dry. The clock on the wall read twelve minutes to the hour; two floors below, half a hundred journalists were gathered for the press conference due to start on the hour. The Prime Minister, a cigarette bobbing on his thick lower lip, was rereading the two versions of his remarks for the dozenth time when the red telephone purred. Zalman Cohen had the receiver pressed to his ear before the ring faded.

  “Cohen.” He listened. “Hold on,” he said testily. He held the phone out to the katsa. “It’s Baruch. He says he’ll only speak to you.”

  The katsa walked over and accepted the phone. “Elihu here.”

  He listened intently, nodding slightly once, twice, a third time. Then he said, “Thank you, Baruch.” Then he set the phone back on its cradle and stared at it for a long moment.

  Cohen bleated, “Well?”

  “How did it go, Elihu?” the Prime Minister asked gently.

  “My man Sweeney is alive. He was tied to a chair, in the darkness he tipped it over when they blew open the door. He’s got a splitting headache from his head hitting the deck, and two bullets in the fleshy part of his shoulder, but he’s going to be all right. The vests saved the boys who came through the door. Two of them were wounded, one in the neck, one in the hand, but neither seriously.”

  “And Apfulbaum?”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead how?” Cohen demanded. “How dead?”

  “He was killed by a small caliber bullet fired at point blank range into his brain while he was tied to a chair.”

  Cohen beamed. “Abu Bakr killed him!”

  “What about Abu Bakr and the others?” asked the chief of the general staff.

  “Abu Bakr fired at the flashes with his pop gun. The first man in was Dror. As all revolvers pull to the right, he had the good sense to plunge to his right, which may have saved his life. He put a bullet through Abu Bakr’s eye.”

  “The bastard was already blind,” cracked Cohen, but nobody smiled.

  “The night vision glasses gave our boys the edge,” Elihu continued. “A second terrorist was almost decapitated by a burst of soft-nosed bullets from an Uzi. When the smoke from the explosion cleared, they discovered a young woman cowering against a wall with the barrel of a pistol in her mouth. Before they could shoot her, she pulled the trigger.”

  “Everything came up roses,” exalted Cohen. “The Renewer shot to death a helpless Rabbi tied to a chair. Our people shot the Renewer. Tit for tat. Who could ask for a better denouement?” Several of the Shin Bet people murmured in agreement.

  “I can think of a better denouement,” Elihu said with quiet intensity. The room fell still; he could feel the eyes of the Prime Minister and the generals and the Shin Bet mandarins on him. “We’re back to square one,” he said. “We’re back to where we were when I was running raids into occupied Palestine and shooting terrorists in their beds.” He remembered quoting a passage from the Torah to his commandos on his swansong raid into Nablus and dredged up the words now. “‘Life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand.’ The Abu Bakr Brigades live by the same creed. One of them will exact vengeance, then we’ll exact vengeance for the vengeance.”

  “Occupied Palestine!” Cohen could not contain himself. “The katsa forgets who he is and where he is.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” the Prime Minister said, addressing Elihu with evident sadness. “I don’t recall ever hearing those words cross your lips
before.”

  Elihu, never one to be intimidated by rank, shot back, “It’s high time we called things by their real name. The late demented Rabbi Apfulbaum and his cronies called Judea and Samaria liberated Palestine. The entire world thinks of it as occupied Palestine. The occupation has corrupted our souls. Our citizen army, created to defend this sliver of a Jewish state from the sea of Arabs around us, has become an army of occupation.”

  With a visible effort, the Prime Minister pushed himself to his feet. “I am relieved that your man Sweeney came out of this in one piece,” he informed the katsa. “Please convey my personal thanks when you see him.” He crumpled one of the two typed speeches and tossed it into a waste basket. “I will with great reluctance accept your resignation when you deliver it in writing, Elihu. You’ve been in the forefront of our never-ending battle for survival too long. You’re burned out—you need a change of scenery; you need a rest.” Striding toward the door, the Prime Minister motioned for Cohen to follow him. “Time for us to go down and tell the world what heroes we all are,” he said.

  An Excerpt from the Harvard “Running History” Project:

  As usual I had one eye glued to CNN and caught the news bulletin as it flashed on the screen—the Prime Minister appeared relieved but grim as he read his prepared statement. When he refused to take questions, CNN cut to the Palestinian Authority Chairman—he looked as if he had weathered a bad case of intestinal flu. My first reaction? The death of Abu Bakr was balanced by the death of the Rabbi. I don’t mean to be crude about it but for us, for the Mt. Washington treaty, that’s the best thing that could have happened. It lets everyone off the hook.

  The call from Zalman Cohen came through while the Chairman was still being interviewed. “The bullet that killed the Rabbi came from the terrorist’s pistol,” he said gleefully. I could tell from his voice that he was celebrating the denouement. “Are you watching the Chairman on CNN?” he asked. “The son of a bitch didn’t give us much help—our people found Abu Bakr on their own. Which is par for the course. You need to understand, Zachary, they can’t be trusted. They condemn terrorism in public but in their heart of hearts they are very happy to keep the pot boiling. Well, now that nobody has started shooting we can come to Washington and sign your treaty. But the Palestinians are going to have to crack down on these Abu Bakr jokers if they expect us to hold up our end of the bargain.”

  I know why nobody likes this guy Cohen. He is a worst-case Cassandra. He believes that if something can go wrong, it will. The trouble with this attitude is that too often it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Hang on a minute. Yes, I’ll take the call… .

  Jesus! You’re sure? …

  How did you find out? …

  Thank you for letting me know.

  Excuse me—I need a moment to collect my thoughts.

  Yes, terrible news. That Palestinian woman I met in Paris—Lamia Ghuri—they found her body under one of the bridges early this morning.

  How did she die? She’d been tied to a stanchion and executed with a single small caliber bullet fired with surgical accuracy into the brain behind her ear. Someone’s trying to send us a message—the Abu Bakr brigade has a long arm.

  Oh my God, it must have been me! I led them to her … I’m responsible for her death!

  FIFTY-TWO

  A QUICKSILVER DAWN SPREAD ACROSS THE JUDEAN WILDERNESS, then slipped under a low ceiling of sullen clouds to stain, in washed-out blood, the stone houses and twisting alleyways of the ancient city of Hebron, which trickled like a lava flow through a north-south wadi between the hills. A short walk into the wadi, at the entrance to the old Kasbah, stood the imposing fortress-like Herodian walls around the Cave of the Patriarchs, the tomb of the progenitor the Jews know as the Prophet Abraham and the Arabs call the Messenger Ibrahim. On the lower terraces of the hills surrounding the city, women collecting firewood on the backs of donkeys moved between century-old waist-high stone walls through orchards and vineyards and gardens. Above the stone walls, goats clung to the flanks of the hills, grazing with sure-footed laziness between the silvery-green leaves of the olive trees.

  On one of the windswept hills dominating Hebron, a procession of mourners snaked out of Beit Avram and started down the dirt path toward the small Jewish cemetery inside the chain-link fence marking the settlement’s limits. At the head of the procession, religious Jews dressed in black skull caps and black suits, their lapels slit in sign of mourning, carried a body wrapped in a white shroud on an Army stretcher. Television cameramen scurried along on either side, filming the funeral.

  Far below, a cortège of religious Muslims appeared on one of the walled paths angling off from the Hebron wadi. They wore white skull caps and white robes and carried on their shoulders a body wrapped in a white shroud. As cameramen sprinted ahead to film them, they began the steep climb toward the Muslim cemetery a stone’s throw downhill from the chain-link fence.

  Israeli soldiers in khaki and Palestinian police in blue, armed with long riot batons and plastic shields, stood around in small groups on either side of the fence. Occasionally a metallic voice would blare from a walkie-talkie, then cut off in mid sentence. The Israeli colonel in charge of security chatted with his Palestinian counterpart through the links of the fence. Off to one side of the Jewish cemetery, near a white television relay truck with a dish antenna on its roof, Baruch was deep in conversation with Max Sweeney.

  “Elihu never did tell me how you got into the business of spying for Israel,” Baruch said.

  “It’s a short story,” Sweeney, his right shoulder taped in bandages, his arm tucked into a sling, replied with a caustic smile. “My father was Irish Catholic, a whiskey-drinking County Cork Sweeney right down to the laces on his working class boots. He left Ireland for the proverbial streets paved with gold and wound up, God knows how, in Seattle, where he fell in love with my mother, who was Jewish. Her mother was a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. Two months shy of my seventeenth birthday, my father ran away with his boss’s secretary. To get me out of the line of fire, my mother packed me off to a kibbutz in the Galilee for the summer, at which point I discovered my Jewishness and fell in love with the country. I wanted to settle here and would have, except the kibbutz secretary turned out to be a Mossad talent scout. The next thing I knew I was being interviewed by Elihu, who convinced me that if I really wanted to serve the state of Israel, I should return to Seattle and become a journalist. All that seems like a lifetime ago. I enrolled in journalism school and put in time on a bunch of small town newspapers before landing my present job. I spent four years reporting from Rome, which is where I had my first contacts with the Palestinian Authority people. The stories I wrote about them were invariably sympathetic—given my paper’s reputation, my editors were delighted to publish anything critical of Israel. I portrayed the Palestinians as Davids bravely struggling against the Israeli Goliath. Because my Arab connections were hot, I was shipped off to Beirut for four years. Gradually the Palestinians there came to trust me, too. I used to buy whiskey at eighty dollars a bottle at the St. George Hotel and wind up drinking into the early hours of the morning with the Palestinian leaders in their apartments. Later I would pass on their addresses, and the floor plans of their apartments, as well as the license plates of their cars, to the katsa.”

  “So you were the source for those commando incursions into the Lebanon and the helicopter raids that singled out automobiles on the roads and destroyed them with missiles.”

  “I was one of the sources, yes. When the shell exploded near my car at the height of the Lebanese civil war, I went back to Seattle for a series of ear operations, after which I was posted to Jerusalem. It was Elihu who got the bright idea of putting a hearing aid in my dead ear so the Mossad could keep track of me. When I was taken to meet the would-be suicide bomber in Gaza right after the Rabbi’s kidnapping, Elihu’s people homed in on the signal and knew exactly where the interview took place.”

  “You were taking a big r
isk.”

  Sweeney shrugged his unbandaged shoulder. “Since the hearing aid actually amplified the sounds it picked up, and since it only transmitted a signal in bursts eighteen minutes before and eighteen minutes after the hour, we figured it was pretty safe.”

  “When I came on the scene, Elihu had you writing stories that got you in hot water with the Israeli censors,” Baruch remembered.

  “My anti-Israeli, pro-Arab slant pretty much cemented my reputation with the Palestinians.”

  The katsa, watching the funeral from the edge of the Jewish cemetery, was breaking in the Mossad officer who’d been named as his replacement. The agents Elihu was running, the safehouses and ciphers he was using, had been passed on at the Mossad hideaway in Jaffa. Now he was bringing him up to date on the Apfulbaum affair. Spotting Sweeney and Baruch below him on the hill, Elihu scrambled over from the cemetery to join them. Above him, under the watchful eye of the new katsa, the religious Jews were lowering the body of their Rabbi into a freshly dug grave in the rust-colored earth. “‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’” Elihu remarked. “Let’s hope this miserable episode ends here.”

  “Did you catch Sa’adat on CNN last night?” Sweeney asked the katsa.

  Baruch grimaced. “The rat accused us of murdering the blind mujaddid and demanded an international inquiry into the raid. Coming from him the accusation has a special irony.”

  “We had no intention of taking prisoners,” Elihu reminded Baruch.

  Baruch studied the ground in discomfort. “You have a short memory, Elihu.”

  “What am I forgetting?”

  “You’re forgetting that Abu Bakr had no intention of taking prisoners when he gunned down the four young Jews guarding I. Apfulbaum. You’re forgetting Efrayim, whose body turned up on a garbage dump in Aza. You’re forgetting the Rabbi—he may have been a crazy Jew, but he was a Jew all the same. You’re forgetting the twenty-four Palestinians who were executed because they cooperated with us.” Baruch studied the katsa’s face; he appeared to have aged a decade in the last week. “So what’s eating you, Elihu?”