by Paul Sussman
'You said you had things on your mind,' he added, noting the confused look on her face. 'I was wondering if I could help.'
'I doubt it,' she said, finishing her coffee. 'Unless you're any good at cracking codes.'
'Actually, I'm not bad. Sort of an amateur hobby. What's the context?'
She raised her eyebrows questioningly.
'Is it a letter, an official document?'
'A letter, I think,' replied Layla. 'Old. Medieval maybe. Or ancient. I can't make head or tail of it. It's just a long sequence of letters with some sort of signature at the bottom. GR.'
He pursed his lips, thinking, then shook his head to indicate that the initials meant nothing to him.
'It's my day off,' he said after a short pause. 'I could take a look if you like.'
She hesitated, knowing that he was attracted to her and not wanting to complicate things.
Before she could refuse the offer, he added, 'No strings attached. Scout's honour. I think after six months I've just about got the message.'
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled and laid her hand on his.
'I'm sorry, Tom. You must think I'm a real bitch.'
'Part of the attraction, to be honest,' he said, grinning wistfully.
She squeezed his hand.
'It would be great if you could take a look. One condition, though. You let me make you lunch.'
'If only you had a code to crack every day,' he said, smiling. 'When's good for you?'
'No time like the present,' said Layla, pushing back her chair and coming to her feet. 'I think I've had my Schenker fix for the week.'
Roberts grabbed his jacket and they made their farewells, Nuha throwing Layla a questioning glance which she returned with a slight shake of her head, as if to say, 'It's not what you think.' As they crossed the courtyard into the hotel foyer, Onz Schenker's voice exploded behind them.
'Yehuda Milan is the last fucking person that can save this country! War hero or no war hero, the man's a fucking liability.'
'Why's that, Onz?' came Sam Rogerson's voice, shouting. 'Because he might actually cut a realistic deal with the Palestinians? It's people like you who are the liability!'
'You're an anti-semite, Rogerson!'
'My wife's a fucking Jew! How can I be an anti-semite?'
'Fuck you, Rogerson!'
'No, fuck you, Schenker! Fuck you right up your fat stinking fascist fucking arse!'
There was a scraping of chairs, the sound of a plate smashing, and a cacophony of shouts telling the two men to sit down and stop being stupid. By that point Layla and Tom Roberts had passed through the hotel foyer and out beneath its arched, bougainvillea-covered front entrance, the voices of their Breakfast Club colleagues fading behind them.
TEL AVIV, THE SHERATON HOTEL
'When people ask me why I oppose the so-called peace process, why I believe in a strong Israel governed by Jews, for Jews, with no Arab presence in our midst, I like to tell them the story of my grandmother.'
Har-Zion leant away from the microphone and took a short sip of water, gazing out at the lunch guests seated in front of him. It was a good crowd, business people mostly, plenty of Americans. A hundred guests, two hundred dollars a head – that was a lot of money for Chayalei David. And that was before the promises of private donations, which would at least double the total. Fifty thousand dollars, say. A lot of money.
Despite that, he wasn't enjoying himself. He never did at these sort of occasions. The suits, the polite conversation, the glad-handing – it wasn't for him. Give him a battlefield any day, or a crowd of screaming Arabs protesting at another Warriors of David occupation. Give him action.
Involuntarily he glanced down at the seat to his right, where his wife Miriam had always used to sit, before the cancer had taken her. Instead of her small, neatly dressed frame he was confronted by an elderly rabbi in a large, fur-trimmed shtreimel. He stared at him for a moment as if confused by his presence, then, with a shake of his head, leant back to the microphone and continued speaking.
'My grandmother, my mother's mother, died when I was only ten, so I never got to know her properly. Even in the few years I did know her, however, I realized she was a remarkable woman. She made food like you never tasted – borscht, gefilte fish, kneidls. The perfect Jewish grandmother!'
A ripple of laughter echoed around the room.
'She did more than cook, however. She knew the Torah better than any rabbi I ever met – no offence.'
He turned to the rabbi beside him, who smiled magnanimously. Another ripple of laughter.
'And sung like no hazzan you have ever heard. Even today, if I close my eyes, I can hear her chanting the kerovah, so sweet, like a nightingale. If she was here now she would enchant you. More than I am doing, certainly!'
A third echo of laughter, accompanied by a few muffled shouts of 'Not true!' Har-Zion raised his glass and took another sip of water.
'She was a strong woman too. Brave. She had to be to survive two years in Gross-Rosen.'
This time there were no shouts or laughter. All eyes were focused on him.
'I loved my grandmother very dearly,' he continued, putting down his glass. 'She taught me so much, told such wonderful stories, invented such great games to play. There was only one thing about her that made me sad: in the time I knew her she never once took me to her breast and hugged me, as grandmothers are meant to. Especially Jewish grandmothers.'
The audience was quiet now, wondering where the story was leading. Beneath his suit Har-Zion's skin felt tight and itchy, as though he had been bound into a pepper-filled straitjacket. He ran his finger around the inside of his collar, trying to loosen it a bit.
'At first I did not take much notice of this. As I grew older, however, it began to affect me. Maybe my bubeh does not love me, I thought. Maybe I have done something wrong. I wanted to ask her why she would never take me in her arms, but I sensed it was not something she wished to speak about, so nothing was ever said. It made me sad and confused.'
Behind him, his bodyguard Avi coughed. It sounded unnaturally loud in the rapt silence that had enveloped the room.
'Only after she died did my mother explain to me the solution to this strange mystery. As a young woman my grandmother had lived in a shtetl in southern Russia. Every Saturday night, after they had been drinking, the Cossacks would come. The Jews would lock themselves in their houses, but the Cossacks would kick down the doors and drag people out onto the street, where they would beat and even kill them. It was fun for them, sport. They were only dirty Jews, after all.'
A hundred pairs of eyes bored into Har-Zion. Beside him, the rabbi was staring at his lap, his head shaking sadly from side to side.
'On one of these occasion the Cossacks seized my grandmother. She was fifteen at the time, a beautiful girl, with long hair and bright eyes. I don't think I need to tell you what they did to her. Five of them. Drunk. In the street, where everyone could see. Afterwards, when they had finished, they wanted a souvenir of their night out. Do you know what souvenir they chose?'
He let the question hang a moment.
'One of my grandmother's breasts. They sliced it off with a knife and carried it away with them, a trophy to hang on their wall.'
There were murmurs of horror. At a table near the front a woman held her napkin to her mouth. The rabbi whispered, 'Dear God.'
'This is why my grandmother would never hug me,' said Har-Zion quietly. 'Because she knew I would notice something wrong, and she was ashamed. She did not want me to know about her pain. She did not want me to be sad for her.'
He stopped, letting his words sink in. There were other stories he could have told, in the same vein. So many other stories. About his own experiences – the teasing, the beatings, the time at the orphanage when they had forced a broom-handle deep into his rectum to cries of 'Fuck the Jew-boy! Fuck the Jew-boy!' Every day of his childhood seemed to have been shadowed with fear and humiliation. But he preferred not to speak about it
. Had never spoken about it. Not even to Miriam, his own wife. It was too raw, too painful, worse even than the burns that had scoured his body and left him looking like a melted waxwork. So he told the story of his grandmother instead, which was close, but not so close as to make him crack, to open up the floodgates. There was so much pain inside. So much horror. Sometimes he felt as if he was drowning in blackness.
He took a third sip of water and, coughing to clear his throat, drove on to the end of the speech, vowing that what had happened to his grandmother would never happen to any Jew again, that he would do whatever he had to do to defend his people, to keep Israel strong.
When he had finished, the audience came to its feet as one, cheering and applauding. He acknowledged the ovation, skin itching uncontrollably beneath his suit, then sat down, Avi stepping forward and helping him ease his chair into the table. The rabbi patted him on the arm.
'You are a good man, Baruch.'
Har-Zion smiled, but made no reply. Am I, he wondered? Good and bad, right and wrong – they no longer seemed to have any meaning. All there was was belief in God and the struggle for survival. It's what he'd been doing his whole life. What his people had been doing for their whole life. He turned slightly, stiffly, gazing at the seven-branched menorah stencilled onto a panel behind his table, thinking about Layla al-Madani and al-Mulatham and all the rest of it, before turning back to the front again and smiling as a photographer came up to take his picture.
JERUSALEM
It was early afternoon when Arieh Ben-Roi drove his battered white BMW through the Jaffa Gate into the Old City, pulling up at the electronic iron barrier in front of the David Police Station, an imposing two-storeyed building in yellow-white Jerusalem stone, with the flags of Israel and the Israeli police fluttering outside and a tall radio mast on the roof, like a tree stripped of all its foliage. The duty guard recognized him and, activating the barrier, waved him through the arched tunnel that cut through the centre of the building and into the walled compound at the rear, where he parked up beside a white Kawasaki Mule police truck. Behind him, a couple of bomb disposal guys were fiddling with one of their robots, adjusting its retractable arm; to his right a horse was being exercised inside a fenced enclosure surrounded by blooming oleander bushes.
He felt like shit, as he did most days, and told himself he ought to cut down on the drinking. As he did most days. He knew he wouldn't, though. It was the only thing that eased the pain, that helped him forget. Without the drink things would be . . . unbearable.
He sat where he was for a moment, wishing he was back in his flat, hidden from the world, alone with his thoughts, then got out of the car and walked slowly back towards the tunnel, turning into a low doorway just inside it and climbing a set of stone stairs to the first floor. His office was halfway down a whitewashed corridor, a small, cramped room with plywood furniture, a computer on a trolley in the corner and, above his desk, a framed photo of a younger, fitter-looking Ben-Roi being awarded the Valiant Conduct Order. He'd got it three years ago for saving a young Palestinian girl from a house fire down near the Mauristan, risking his life kicking in the front door, fighting his way upstairs through the flames and carrying her to safety across the rooftops. At the time he'd been proud of himself; now he thought what a bloody stupid thing to do. He should have left her to burn. Shame there hadn't been more of them in there.
The office was empty when he arrived and, shutting the door behind him, he sat down at his desk, pulled out his hip-flask and took a long, slow swig. The liquid drilled down his throat, sending warmth radiating outwards through his chest and stomach. He took another swig and his mind started to clear, his mood improve. A third swig and he felt just about ready for the day ahead.
The door flew open.
'Don't you ever fucking knock, Feldman?' he snapped, ducking the flask down below the desk and struggling to screw the lid back on.
Feldman noted what he was doing and shook his head.
'For fuck's sake, it's not even lunchtime.'
Ben-Roi ignored him, slipping the flask into the pocket of his jeans.
'What do you want?'
'We're starting prelim interviews of the guys we brought in last night. Thought you might want to do the one you caught.'
Feldman smirked slightly on the phrase 'one you caught', reminding Ben-Roi of his failed chase through the Kidron Valley. Wanker.
'Where is he?'
'Interview Three. You think you can handle him on your own?'
Ben-Roi ignored the sarcasm, got to his feet, snatched a folder off the desk and crossed the office. As he pushed past Feldman he felt a hand on his arm.
'Sort yourself out, man. You can't go on like this.'
There was a momentary pause, then Feldman withdrew his hand.
'Look, Arieh, I know what you've—'
'You know fuck all, Feldman. You understand me? Fuck all.'
Ben-Roi glared down at his colleague, then strode out of the office and down the corridor, fighting back the urge to take another long glug of vodka. Pity and rebuke, that's all he seemed to get these days. Pity for what had happened, and rebuke for how he'd dealt with it. The latter he could handle. But not the pity. Not that. It unmanned him. God, he wished he'd stayed with her in the square that night.
He descended the staircase back into the tunnel. The interview rooms were through a doorway in the opposite wall, but instead of going directly there he turned left, back into the compound, and then right into a modern, glass-fronted annexe tacked onto the rear of the station, passing through a cool, softly lit foyer and into a large control room with a double bank of colour television screens on its far wall. Each screen carried a different image of the Old City – the Western Wall, the Damascus Gate, the Haram al-Sharif, the Cardo – relayed by one of the three hundred security cameras bolted at every street corner. The images changed frequently as the system switched from camera to camera, while every now and then one of the screens would turn orange and a CAMERA DOWN legend would appear.
Two semi-circular control desks, one inside the other like a pair of inverted commas, sat in front of the screens, manned by uniformed officers. Ben-Roi crossed to the first of these and tapped a large, blonde-haired girl on the shoulder.
'I need some footage from last night,' he said. 'Interior Lions Gate. From about eleven forty-five.'
The girl nodded and, after calling to one of her colleagues that she was leaving her post for a few minutes, ushered Ben-Roi into a side room where she sat him down in front of a computer and, leaning over his shoulder, clicked various icons with a mouse until she had located the footage he wanted, of the previous night's drugs bust.
He sat and watched as the operation played itself out, occasionally asking the girl to rewind, zoom in on something or click to a different camera, tracking the young Palestinian man he had chased from the moment he arrived at the gate with his three colleagues, through the appearance of the dope-laden Mercedes, to the point where the police swooped and, unnoticed in the confusion, the man scrambled over a gate into the Haram al-Sharif and then over the Old City walls into the Muslim cemetery below, flitting from tombstone to tombstone down towards the Ophel Road.
'OK, that's enough,' he said eventually. 'Can I get a copy?'
The blonde girl disappeared, returning a couple of minutes later with a CD. He slipped it into the folder he was carrying and left the control centre, heading back into the main building.
Interview Room 3 was in the basement, a bare, whitewashed room with a stone floor and single strip light in the ceiling. The Palestinian man was sitting behind a rickety plywood table, his wrists handcuffed, his left eye swollen and puffy. Ben-Roi pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him.
'I want a lawyer,' mumbled the man, staring at the table.
'You're going to fucking need one,' grunted the detective, opening his file, laying the CD to one side and removing a typewritten sheet – the arrest report he'd filled out the previous night.
'Ha
ni al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal,' he said, reading the personal details at the top of the report. 'That's a fucking stupid name.'
He put the sheet down.
'Look at me.'
The young man looked up, biting his lip, eyes bright with fear. He looked tiny beside Ben-Roi, a child in front of a teacher.
'You're going to tell me the truth, aren't you, Hani? Every question I ask you. The truth.'
There was an imperceptible nod. The young man's thighs were clenched tightly together as if he was expecting some assault from beneath the table. Ben-Roi stared at him, enjoying his fear, gratified by it. Then, without taking his eyes away, he reached out with his left hand and slid the CD across the desktop.
'This is for you.'
The man stared down at it, confused, frightened.
