The Terrorist's Holiday

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Lillian called.”

  “I’m working on Stanley Plotnik. He never leaves that practice of his for more than a week.”

  “Doctors are always in demand.”

  “Bullshit. He can’t stand the thought of losing the money. But between Toby and your wife and me, I think we’ve got Beverly convinced she should work harder on him too. He could give a few thousand just like that. You’ll try too if you see him soon?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Good. When will you sit shiva with the Goldsteins?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “There’s no easy time to say Kaddish for an eighteen-year-old.”

  “I realize that.”

  “OK,” Marcus said but paused for a long moment. “We’ll talk then.”

  “Good-bye.”

  When he hung up the phone, Abe sat back and thought again. He didn’t mind going up to the Catskills for Passover. They had been doing it for years and years now, ever since his mother passed away and his father went into the home; but he liked to think of it as a vacation, as a time to relax. Didn’t he earn it, work hard enough to deserve it?

  Sometimes, when the weather was good up there, he could get in a little golf. The New Prospect was a dream resort. He wanted to lower himself into the recreations like someone easing himself into a warm bath. The card games, the indoor pool, the nightclub, and the good meals were all designed to make you relax and forget the hard, cold, real world. Now, his wife and many of his friends were going to make it a time of intense Zionistic activities. All the guests, upwards of twenty-five hundred, would feel an obligation to be serious and talk politics. How could he think about gin rummy when the Arabs were planning on attacking a kibbutz full of children?

  Unlike many of the people he knew, being a Jew had never been a burden to him. Most of them carried the weight of great suffering in their faces and in their talk. He had always been well protected and pleasantly unaware of the havoc that rattled outside the walls of his fine home, his fine education, and his fine possessions. He was a practicing member of a reformed synagogue, but he didn’t consider himself a religious person. He knew that some of his Conservative and Orthodox friends called the Reform Synagogue religion with convenience, and he tended to agree with them. But that didn’t matter. None of it did.

  As he sat there thinking, it seemed to him that nothing in his life worked him up—not his Jewishness, not his business, not even his family. I really need this vacation, he thought. I need a renewal, a reincarnation, a revival. The hell with it all. I’m going to have a good time. He was so determined about it that he deliberately left for lunch a half hour early just to be extravagant with his leisure time.

  2

  Yusuf was having the dream again. People were kneeling before him and pleading for their lives. They were all ages and sizes, and they were all naked. The mass of them was very similar to those pictures of the Nazi concentration camps. Now he was walking among them. They were still on their knees. Most were afraid to look up at him. Some did, and some tried to reach out to have him touch them with mercy. He was smiling. A Jewess, perhaps in her late teens, offered her body to him. She had her hands under her breasts and lifted them as an offering. He swung out and whipped her across the tops, near the nipples. She screeched in pain and cowered back. There was a group on their stomachs. He stood on the buttocks of an old male and surveyed the people. Suddenly he was naked too, and he had a terrible erection. It began to swell and pulsate. The people began to laugh. He was shouting at them, and they were laughing harder and harder. His neck strained with the effort to shut them up, his veins visible just below the skin. They wouldn’t stop. It was horrible. He woke with a start.

  As usual he was sweating, and he did have an erection. It frightened him and he sat up quickly. There was barely enough light in the room to make out the outlines of chairs and a dresser. He had the window covered with a dark shade. He rubbed his cheeks vigorously to take the numbness out of his face and then swung his feet out over the side of the bed. He thought for a moment. The picture of the hawk and the sword was a dark blur on the mirror, but it comforted him nevertheless.

  He stood up to go to the bathroom. He had to walk through the living room, which served as a bedroom for Nessim and Clea. They had a pullout couch. There was a little more light out there and it was easy to find his way across the room without bumping into a table or dresser, but he still had to walk close to their bed. Clea was turned away, facing the windows, also shaded; Nessim was on his back. Clea’s long black hair traveled over Nessim’s right arm. Yusuf hesitated a moment. Her naked back was exposed, the cover drawn up over her breasts and angled down across the small of her back.

  He had seen Clea naked before, and although it excited him, he always felt guilty. She was his brother’s woman. They had met her in Athens. She was stuck there en route to France because her mother had suffered a stroke. Her mother was from France, but her father had been a Palestinian. He was killed in the shelling, and Clea and her mother had decided to leave the endless bloodbath known as “the Middle Eastern Situation.”

  Nessim and Yusuf were part of the organization’s force to be stationed in America. As far as Hezbollah was concerned, there were two battlegrounds on which to wage the war against Israel and the Zionist imperialists—the Middle East and America. Without America, there would be no strong Israel with which to contend. Therefore, to defeat Israel on the home ground, she first had to be defeated in the States. The government and the people of America had to be influenced and persuaded. Privately, the leadership was happy with some of the results that the oil embargo had created, but they were unhappy with the tempo of change. Also, they were aware of the strong and effective Jewish organization in America. Ways had to be found to get at them and weaken them. For that purpose, units were to be sent to the States. Nessim and Yusuf were on the first leg of their journey when they met up with Clea.

  Nessim had fallen in love with her almost immediately and she saw strength and hope in him. He was nearly eleven years older than she was, and seemed beyond defeat, drawing up pictures of a new world for her. But she had been reluctant to leave the West Bank. As terrible as the situation had become, it was still her home, and France was a far-off uncertainty. Nessim radiated optimism, the positive belief of a man who had full faith in his cause. Caught in a world of turmoil with everything she knew disintegrating around her, Clea was eager to become involved with someone as dynamic and promising as Nessim.

  Yusuf, who loved his brother with an idolization close to religious zeal, sat with them in Athens and listened to Nessim’s soft, convincing optimism. Clea sat with smiling eyes and drifted in and out of his words, moving to the undulating rhythms of his statements. She accepted him as a leader of causes with all the romance it involved and desperately tried to ignore the truth of what that meant he would become and would do. Someday it would all be over, and they would return to the West Bank, live on a quiet farm, and raise beautiful children, like her parents had hoped to do.

  When her mother died, Clea turned to Nessim completely and without question, changed the direction of her travel plans, and accepted his destiny as her own. They were all off to America to work some kind of magic and help bring an honorable peace to the Middle East. As a symbolic gesture to the dream, Nessim did not propose marriage to her.

  “We shall do that ceremony when we can enjoy some relative peace,” he had said, and she had accepted the temporary relationship he proposed.

  Yusuf knew that Nessim had great difficulty getting the organization to permit him to take Clea along, but together, the three of them moved on and came into the United States to be part of the illegal alien movement Hezbollah and its allies had managed.

  The command had created an overall battle plan that called for different units to integrate themselves into a community and be ready to act when they were called on to act. Up to this
point, Nessim had only performed small acts of sabotage, but he was waiting. The big order was coming soon. It had been promised. They knew his great value. He had been trained by Russian demolition experts, and the command considered him one of its most important fifth columnists. He had built himself a significant reputation in the Middle East, and it was only because of the new importance the organization had placed on the American front that he was shipped out at all.

  “What is it?” Nessim now whispered to Yusuf, raising his head off the pillow.

  “I had a nightmare. I’ve got to splash cold water on my face.” Yusuf moved on and went into the bathroom.

  When he had come home after the assassination of the young JDL member that night, he had gone right to his bedroom and fallen asleep. Nessim and Clea were over at Hassil’s, and they didn’t get back until very early in the morning. He was eager to tell Nessim what he had accomplished, but he didn’t want to say anything in front of Clea. He would wait until the morning when they were alone. Clea worked as a waitress in an Armenian restaurant on Thirty-First and Madison. She went in at ten and worked until eleven at night, six days a week.

  Yusuf turned on the bathroom light and looked at his face in the mirror. He thought he could see the great changes in his features that had come about these past few months. It was as if something inside was eating away at him, bringing down his youth and casting the pallor of age and death over him. His eyes had grown dull, and his facial muscles drooped. He looked like a man who was perpetually angry. Even Nessim had commented.

  “You must permit yourself to forget for a little while. Hatred is a small parasite. It feeds like a parasite lives on a host, eating away at your soul. We are driven by it, but we must not let it suck the life out of us.”

  Yusuf splashed cold water over his cheeks and began patting his forehead. Suddenly he noticed blood on the inside of his fingers, where he had held the ice pick. It frightened and nauseated him. The Jew had been with him all this time—a part of him had followed. He shoved his hands into the water and scrubbed them madly with a bar of soap. Before he was finished and dried, the bathroom door opened and Nessim stepped inside. He brought his finger to his lips to indicate silence and then closed the door behind him.

  “What is it?”

  “Just a dream. I told you.”

  “You’re too intense. Animals catch their prey best when they pretend to ignore them and the prey becomes relaxed and confident. Then the animals strike and succeed.”

  “We wait too much and strike too little.”

  Nessim studied his brother for a long moment. He knew him with the sensitive touch a blind man uses to know the world around him.

  Yusuf was smaller and thinner than he was, taking more after their mother than their father. Nessim stood six feet two and had broad shoulders. He had thick forearms and big hands. Yusuf’s hands were big, but the fingers weren’t as powerful or as thick.

  There was also a difference in their faces—Nessim’s contained a controlled intensity. He could direct his eyes and manipulate his facial muscles to remain still and exhibit great concentration. He had energy, but it wasn’t in any way an anxious energy. It was the face of a man with great inner strength, a man who had a fine domination over his nervous system. He moved with the sleek silence of a cat and spoke with the softness of a transcendental guru. On the surface, he appeared to be a man at great peace with the world. This superficial cover made his thrust and blow that much more effective. He could strike out with the swiftness of a snake and quickly retreat to the peacefulness of a turtle’s shell. Nessim was a man of great extremes. Only someone who had been through the eye of a hurricane could understand the ominous silence in his eyes.

  “Why do you choose to wash up now?”

  “I went right to bed.”

  “Where were you?”

  “With Abu, the son of Abu.”

  “You don’t use those names in public?”

  “When we’re alone,” Yusuf said, but he was obvious about his unhappiness over it.

  “You must be careful. We can’t afford suspicions. Not now.”

  “Have you heard something new?”

  Nessim turned to the toilet and began to urinate. “A message might come tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow. Finally.” Yusuf slapped his hands together.

  “Quiet.”

  “How will the message come?”

  “In the classified section. It’ll tell us where to go for the meeting.”

  The command used the Lost and Found column. The heading was always, “Lost, a pair of Siamese cats, one with a red ribbon, and one with a blue.”

  “I don’t know why they do that.”

  “They do it to be careful. We must always be careful. Always. You don’t understand that yet. We are always around our enemies.”

  “I know that,” Yusuf said, his eyes firing up.

  “You know that too well. They can learn it from you. That’s a weakness.”

  “I’m careful. You’ll see. You’ll be proud of us when you …”

  “What?” Nessim turned quickly. He knew that expression on Yusuf’s face. “What else were you going to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  Nessim grasped Yusuf’s arm and squeezed it tightly. Yusuf felt the power of his fingers. His forearm began to ache.

  “What?”

  “I struck out for the hawk.”

  Nessim’s eyes widened. He turned Yusuf’s body completely around and pressed him against the wall.

  “How?”

  “Abu and I. We took one of them down. A JDL demonstrator.”

  “Where? How?”

  “Nessim,” Clea called.

  “Shh.” He opened the door a crack. “What is it?”

  “I heard talking.”

  “Yusuf and I. Go to sleep. It’s all right.”

  “Nothing’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  She was quiet so he closed the door. Then he leaned back.

  His face suddenly exhibited a new control. His body relaxed, and he spoke softer.

  “Tell me everything. Quickly.”

  “We went up to Wallace Avenue, to that JDL hangout, and we waited for an opportunity. We’ve been going up there periodically, waiting for the chance. Tonight we had it.”

  “Had what?”

  “We caught one of them alone, near an alley. I drove an ice pick into his neck.” He added, “The way you once showed me.” His face distorted as he re-experienced it.

  Nessim took a deep breath. “You did this and got away clean?”

  “Clean. And Abu was great. He played the decoy. He’s ready to do big things.”

  Nessim stared for a moment. “You might have done great damage to the general plan.”

  “How? We’ve struck out and driven fear into their hearts,” Yusuf said, a look of disappointment moving quickly over his face.

  “You’ve also placed them on their guard and you’ve brought down the house. Idiot, this will bring on intense investigations. You took one life. A meaningless act.”

  “Meaningless?”

  “Timing-wise. I told you the plan was imminent. You think I came all the way over here to kill one Jew?”

  “But …”

  “But nothing. Why did you do this without checking with me?”

  “To prove our value.”

  “This was no way to do that. You might have proven not only your lack of value, but mine as well because you’re with me.”

  “I did it for us …” Yusuf’s face showed a new fear. He looked away.

  “Go to sleep. I can’t think about it now. In the morning we’ll talk some more. In the meantime we’ll wait to see what the command does—how they react to this.”

  “If they don’t like it, we won’t own up to it.”

  �
��Lying to the command is not the way for us to present a unified strike. We can’t divide ourselves now. I want you to get Abu over here tomorrow. He must understand everything. You’ve baptized him in blood, and he must understand the significance of the new religion.”

  “I only meant to help you, Nessim.”

  “I know that,” Nessim said. There was great fatigue in his voice. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  He stepped out of the bathroom. Yusuf hesitated a moment. He felt terribly depressed. The bloodstained water remained in the sink. It began to sicken him, and he felt a weakness in his stomach. Quickly, he pulled out the drain and let it disappear. The residue remained. He washed it away, fighting back a dry heave as he did so. Then he shut off the light and moved across the living room. Nessim was turned away. His arm was draped loosely over Clea’s hip. When Yusuf shut the door to his room, he stood in the darkness, cursing wildly to himself. He didn’t know whom to strike out at.

  Those damn Jews, he thought. They defeat me even in their deaths. He raged on in the darkness until he grew tired again and drifted back to sleep.

  3

  Hassil called right after he saw the morning papers. As a legal American citizen, he served Hezbollah by performing his role as a section commander to oversee the illegal aliens whom the organization sent over from the Middle East. Those in his section checked with him periodically, the way parolees check in with a parole officer. He was a 250-pound, five-foot-eight-inch man with heavy hips and a face of thick, large features. At first glance, he looked to be a man suffering from elephantiasis. The insides of his thighs brushed against each other when he walked, making him waddle. The smallest physical activity was a major exertion for him. In every room in his apartment, there was some kind of sweet or rich food to nibble. Nessim had often made the comment that Hassil experienced sexual pleasure by masticating while others reached it by masturbating.

  “He looks at food the way you and I would look at a woman,” he told Yusuf. Nessim knew that Yusuf detested their visits to Hassil’s, and he left his brother behind whenever he could. He now wished he had not done that the last time.