Obsession (Year of Fire)

by Florencia Bonelli

  “What do you mean why did I come? To see my princess.”

  “You’re really living the good life, Don Aldo,” Juana commented as her dark Syrian eyes danced around the room, taking in the details of the Vendôme.

  “I work hard and I like to treat myself.”

  “What do you do, Don Aldo?”

  “He’s a broker,” Matilde said defensively. “I already told you, Juani.”

  “Mat and I never really understood what being a broker involves.”

  “I buy and sell things all over the world.”

  “And that earns you a lot of cash, it seems.”

  “If you do it well and have a good network of customers, yes.”

  “Papa, aren’t you going to ask me about Celia?”

  “I already know all about your sister. Jean-Paul told me where she is and why.”

  “Are you going to go see her?”

  “They won’t let me. Not yet. I’ll come back when they allow her to have contact with family and friends. It’s what’s best for her.”

  “When are you going to Córdoba?”

  “When am I going? We’re going,” Aldo corrected her. “We’ll go with the Blahetters, when they hand Roy over.”

  Another silence fell upon the table. Matilde felt the warmth of Al-Saud’s hand on her knee; he didn’t squeeze it, just left it there.

  “I’m not leaving Paris, Papa. I’m going to stay.”

  “Matilde! This is your husband’s funeral. How can you even think of saying that you won’t go? The Blahetters will be scandalized!”

  “Papa…” Al-Saud felt her flagging and stroked her knee to infuse her with confidence. “Papa, Roy was my ex-husband. There is nothing left to tie me to his memory or his family, who always hated me anyway. I’m not going to waste my time trying to please the Blahetters. I came to Paris to achieve a goal and nothing is going to divert me from it.”

  “I don’t really see how getting involved with this character is helping you to achieve your goal.”

  “Papa!” Matilde stood up and yanked her coat off the back of her chair. Juana and Al-Saud followed her. “This character is called Eliah and he’s the best man on the face of the planet. Since you’re not capable of treating him in the manner he deserves, I’ll leave. Let’s go. I need to get out of here.”

  Minutes later, as she was trying to put the tongue of her seat belt into the buckle, she noticed that her hands were shaking. Al-Saud helped her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Was that what you really wanted to do?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled, “but it hurts me to be so mean to him.”

  “If you had agreed to go to Córdoba, you would be furious and frustrated, wouldn’t you?” Matilde nodded. “Your father has to understand that he’s your father, not your master. Your life is yours, and only you can decide what to do with it. No one can interfere with that.”

  “Not even you?” she asked, teasing him. Her brazen expression wasn’t so far away from a smile.

  “Not even me,” he admitted, reluctantly.

  As soon as the Aston Martin pulled out, Juana’s cell phone rang.

  “It’s your old man, Mat.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him now.” The confidence in her voice surprised her at first and then made her proud. Her rudeness had made her braver.

  When they got back to the house on Avenue Elisée Reclus, Al-Saud shut himself in his office and called Chevrikov.

  “Lefortovo, I need you to investigate a man called Aldo Martínez Olazábal. He’s Argentinean. And he says he’s a broker.”

  “I haven’t heard the name before. As soon as I hear something, I’ll call you. Listen, Horse of Fire, I have the other thing you asked for ready, the retouched photographs.”

  “I’ll come for them very early tomorrow morning, on the way to Le Bourget. What have you found out about Fauzi Dahlan?”

  “Nothing good. He’s part of Kusay Hussein’s circle.”

  “Saddam Hussein’s son?”

  “One and the same. He’s currently in charge of the presidential police, who are something like the secret police. As far as I could tell from my Iraqi friends, Dahlan was Abu Nidal’s right-hand man.” He referred to the CIA and Mossad’s most wanted, a man who was accused of hundreds of murders and assassinations. “As ever with Abu Nidal, their friendship ended badly, and Dahlan put himself at the Iraqi regime’s service. They say that he’s in charge of the torture. With regard to Udo Jürkens, I regret to inform you that I have nothing on him. I spoke to my contacts in Hamburg and Berlin and they’ve never heard of him.”

  On Monday morning, the katsas Diuna Kimcha and Mila Cibin were at the Mossad base in the basement of the Israeli embassy in Paris. They had requested a conference call with their boss, Ariel Bergman, and were waiting to be connected. They were anxious to share the information they had.

  “Shalom,” said Bergman, and the katsas responded likewise.

  Kimcha spoke first.

  “The sayan at the Ritz advised us that Mohamed Abu Yihad has been staying there for two days.” Kimcha had used Aldo Martínez Olazábal’s Muslim name. “Furthermore, we were already aware that Adnan Khashoggi and Ernst Glatt have been at the Ritz for a week. Coincidence?”

  Bergman absorbed the news for a few seconds during which his agents didn’t dare to disturb him.

  “Nothing is coincidence,” said the boss. “Abu Yihad is looking to get weapons, that much is clear, and he’s planning on doing it through Khashoggi and Glatt. Khashoggi and Glatt may be illegal traffickers, but they traffic with permission from us and the CIA and are an invaluable source of information. Soon we’ll know who Abu Yihad is trying to buy weapons for.”

  “Our sayan at the Ritz took these photos,” said Cibin, and Bergman’s screen in Amsterdam displayed several images of Abu Yihad and Eliah Al-Saud drinking coffee in the Ritz’s opulent bar in the company of two young women. The photograph silenced Bergman. “That’s Eliah Al-Saud.”

  “Yes, I recognize him. Who are the women?”

  “We don’t know,” Cibin admitted. “We’re on it. Have you had any news from Salvador Dalí?”

  “He reported last week to tell me that he didn’t have anything yet.”

  “Ariel, one last thing,” Diuna Kimcha intervened. “Guillermo Blahetter arrived in Paris on a private jet. His grandson, Roy Blahetter, died three days ago at the Hospital Européen Georges Pompidou. The cause of death is unknown, so the body has been sent for an autopsy. Our sayan with the Parisian police will send us the report as soon as Forensics finishes their work.”

  “It’s urgent that you give me the results as soon as you get them,” Bergman emphasized. “What have you found out about Udo Jürkens?”

  “Nothing.”

  Ariel Bergman cursed under his breath. The plot was becoming impossible to understand.

  Matilde spent the week in a daze. She was disoriented by Al-Saud’s absence, and the realization that she couldn’t live without him terrified her. On Monday she got up at six to have breakfast with him before he left for the airport. He hadn’t said where he was going and she didn’t pry. She was so distracted as she helped him pack his bags, almost happy to be participating in such an intimate activity, and even happier when Al-Saud picked up her portrait from his bedside table and put it in his suitcase, that she didn’t foresee how much she would suffer when they said good-bye and she realized that she wouldn’t see him for a few days—he didn’t say how many. They said good-bye in the privacy of the bedroom, she still wearing her nightdress and robe, and he sober in his dark-gray Brioni suit and bespoke black English shoes, clouded in the aroma of Givenchy Gentleman.

  “I beg you,” he said with his eyes closed, speaking into Matilde’s lips, “not to do anything foolish. Don’t expose yourself needlessly. Promise me that you’ll take care of yourself!”

  “I promise, my love.”

  “I want you to know that I wouldn’t leave Paris if it wasn’t strictly necessary. There are busi
ness things that I can’t keep putting off.”

  “Don’t do that, don’t put anything off for me.”

  “Diana and Sándor are going to protect you very well. And everyone is on the alert. Do you have the numbers for Alamán, Tony and Mike close by?”

  “Yes, yes, I have everything.”

  Whenever Matilde worried she remembered their final kiss. She closed her eyes and projected it in her mind as though it were her favorite scene from a movie. She did this when she woke up at three in the morning, alone in Eliah’s bed, soaked in sweat, still confused by the vestiges of an unintelligible dream in which Roy’s and Celia’s and Aldo’s faces had all been mixed together. She did it again when Ezequiel called on Wednesday night to inform her that the autopsy revealed that Roy had been injected in the left thigh with a pinhead-sized pellet of ricin, one of the most potent poisons in existence. And again when, one by one, her in-laws, even Grandfather Guillermo, called to rebuke her for not coming to Córdoba with them. Finally, she brought up the image once more as she sat in the waiting room in the police station before she went to be interrogated by an inspector named Dussollier. He asked her if she knew what her husband was up to, if Roy had enemies, if she knew who had given him the beating that put him in the hospital, if he was involved in drugs, if he hung around with “strange” people, if he had foreign friends. She answered no to almost everything, or that she didn’t know. “We were separated,” she kept repeating, though it didn’t seem to matter to Dussollier. On that occasion, she was flanked by Alamán and Eliah’s lawyer, Dr. Lafrange. Diana, Sándor and Juana were nearby. When she left the police station, she tilted her head up and let the falling rain wash her clean. She took Alamán’s arm and walked in silence along Quai des Orfèvres until she plucked up the courage to whisper, “When is your brother coming back?”

  “What?” asked Alamán, leaning down to hear her better.

  “I said, when will your brother be back?”

  Alamán noticed that Matilde had started to blush, as if she was embarrassed to ask about the man she lived with.

  “He hasn’t called you?” Matilde shook her head. “He promised our old lady that he would go to her birthday party, on Saturday. I imagine that he’ll keep his word.”

  “Your mother’s birthday is Saturday?”

  “Really it’s today, the nineteenth of February, but the party will be on Saturday. She asked me to invite you and Juana.”

  “Eliah didn’t mention it to me. Maybe it’s better if Juana and I don’t go.”

  “Ay, Mat! You’re such a bore!” Juana complained.

  Claude Masséna didn’t look good. His generally disheveled look was accentuated by large bags under his eyes and shaking hands. He took a tranquilizer to alleviate the constant panic he had suffered from since he’d agreed to work for the men who insisted on calling him by the name of a Spanish painter. He left his office at the base and went to the bathroom before slipping into the Alma-Marceau métro station. He was supposed to be giving them information about the location for the next hand-off of evidence. Although he didn’t know what the evidence was, he suspected that it was valuable. He put the car in gear and waited, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, until the car elevator took him up to the street level at Rue Maréchal Harispe. He drove quickly, running through a few red lights; he needed to get back, he didn’t want his bosses to notice his absence and question him any further. His hand was shaking as he put the coin into the pay phone in the station.

  “Hello?”

  “Picasso? It’s Salvador Dalí.”

  “Go ahead,” said Ariel Bergman.

  “The nineteenth of February, Al-Saud said that he’d be meeting a man named Mark Levy himself in Beirut.”

  “Beirut, the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “To get more evidence, that’s all I know.”

  “Where in Beirut?”

  “A bar, the Tropicale, at the Summerland Hotel.”

  “When?”

  “It’s set for ten p.m.”

  It had been an intense week, the kind he hugely enjoyed and that boosted his energy. This last one, however, had become a race against time and his commitments so he could return to Paris, to Matilde. Sitting at a table in Scott’s, the luxurious London restaurant on Mount Street, where he often enjoyed exquisite fish dishes, he yearned for the moment when he would see her again. That Friday night he had agreed to have dinner with Madame Gulemale, so his return to Paris would be postponed until the next day. Gulemale had called him on Wednesday, while he was in Beirut, and they had agreed to meet that night in London. He didn’t have any desire to see her; it wouldn’t be easy to leave her in a good mood without the usual roll in the hay at the Dorchester, the arms dealer’s favorite hotel. And yet he needed to keep Gulemale happy so she could help make things easier for them in the Congo and the Israeli Shaul Zeevi could get his damned coltan. Gulemale would demand a high fee for her intervention. The contract signed by Mercure and Zeevi had anticipated that it wouldn’t be more than ten million dollars.

  He checked the time. Eight twenty. He was tired. He hadn’t slept much in the last five days. He made an effort to erase Matilde from his mind and concentrate on reviewing the events of the week, which had started in Amsterdam, in a seedy bar in Bijlmer, where his second meeting with Lars Meijer had taken place. They sat at a remote table, in a corner that was submerged in half darkness, after Al-Saud had frisked the Dutch journalist in the bathroom to make sure that he wasn’t wearing a recorder, camera or microphone. The journalist, annoyed, sat opposite Al-Saud, who gave him an envelope of photos. He studied them one by one.

  “These photographs were taken by Moshé Bouchiki, a scientist at the Israeli Institute of Biological Research. He’s the one who told me that the El Al flight was transporting at least two of the chemicals used to make nerve agents—tabun, sarin and soman—and that they did so regularly from a laboratory in New York and another in Argentina. These photos show the part of the institute dedicated to the development of chemical weapons. In these two photos you can see the entry records for dimethyl methyl phosphate, thionyl chloride, methyl fluorosulfonate, isopropyl and other substances used in the manufacture of poison gas.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Meijer, excitedly, flipping avidly through the photographs, “they’re all composite organophosphates, like the ones used in many different insecticides.”

  “I see you know the subject.”

  “I was doing some research,” he admitted. “It would be stupendous to be able to interview the scientist, this…”

  “Moshé Bouchiki. I’m afraid that’s impossible. He was murdered a few days ago in Cairo.”

  Lars Meijer’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened.

  “How strange! I didn’t hear anything about it, it wasn’t in the newspapers.”

  “The event was barely covered in the local newspapers and didn’t reach the international wires.” He handed him four clippings from Cairo newspapers. “I’ll give you the information that you need, and you can have these translated to corroborate what I tell you.”

  “Yes, I will. So, I’m listening.” Meijer got ready, flipping open his notebook.

  Al-Saud told him about the exchange at the Semiramis Intercontinental in Cairo and the attack from the Nile.

  “Wow! Straight out of a James Bond movie.”

  “Meijer, it’s urgent that you publish the news within a week.”

  “A week?” the young man spluttered. “I don’t have irrefutable proof that the El Al flight was transporting these substances. The photos are significant, but there’s no documentation that proves what I really need to prove.”

  “Bouchiki’s death delayed my plans, as you can understand,” Al-Saud declared. “Nevertheless, we will soon have everything we need to make a watertight case. Meanwhile, I need you to bring these photographs to light and reveal Bouchiki’s death. And to subtly relate it to the crash in this neighborhood two years ago.
That will start laying the groundwork.”

  “Next week is too soon,” Meijer persisted. “I need to verify that the evidence is legitimate. I could lose my job if something were faked.”

  “Meijer,” Al-Saud said impatiently, “how the hell do you plan on verifying that? Are you going to go to Ness-Ziona, to the institute, knock on the door and ask permission to check that everything in these photographs is real? I promise you that what I did to get in touch with Bouchiki in Ness-Ziona was more spectacular than I’ve seen in any James Bond movie. I don’t think you have the skills necessary to do what I did. But perhaps I’m wrong?”

  “No, of course not. But…”

  “This article could be an opportunity for you to set your career on a path to glory. At least with this material, we’ll be starting to question the innocence that El Al has proclaimed for two years. Don’t think that I don’t know that your colleagues are ridiculing you for your theory about the toxic substances. This would be sweet revenge, wouldn’t it?” There was a pause, followed by a change in Al-Saud’s tone that made Meijer uneasy. “If you’re not ready to publish this week, then I’m afraid I’ll have to turn to a friend at The Sun in London. I would have preferred for you to publish them, since you’ve been committed to this story since the accident itself, but if your scruples are getting in the way…”

  “I’ll do it,” the journalist conceded. “I don’t know what day of the week it’ll be, but I’ll do it. I have to talk to my editor first.”

  “I advise you for your own good to keep those photographs in a safe place and only show them to people who have your utmost trust. There’s a lot at risk, Mr. Meijer. This is not a game.”

  “I know.”

  “I have to go.” Al-Saud stood up and threw down a ten-guilder note to pay for the coffees. “Don’t call me, don’t try to communicate with me. I’ll contact you when I have the rest of the information.”

  “Mr. Al-Saud.” Eliah turned around to look at him. “When will I be able to interview you for my book about private military businesses?”

  Al-Saud leered in a way that made Lars Meijer uncomfortable.