Anit propped her chin on her hand. “So you’re not merely good-looking,” she inquired wryly, “but wealthy? How nice for you.”
Her directness startled and amused him. “Since you ask, it’s my mother who’s wealthy—my grandfather Brooke founded an investment-banking business into which Dad married. In Mom’s defense, she compensates for good fortune by being relentlessly liberal on every issue there is. What dead Italian composers are to Dad, Democratic politicians are to my mother: an object of charitable giving. Except that Mom can try to tell them what to do.”
Anit smiled at this. “Somehow I sense less excitement at her enthusiasms.”
Brooke sipped his Manhattan. “Less as an adult. I’ve decided that facts should inform my beliefs rather than beliefs dictate my choice of facts. A healthy bias for a would-be professor of Middle Eastern Studies.”
Anit looked curious. “Did your parents hope you’d enter the family business?”
“They don’t mind that I’m not. But like most Americans, my parents’ beliefs about the Middle East are derivative. This particular enthusiasm is my own.”
Briefly, Anit looked around them, her gaze keen and observant. In that moment, Brooke imagined her as an anthropologist, noting differences between this place and a nightclub in Tel Aviv. “I think you’re right about Americans,” she remarked. “Too often they seem to believe what they wish. Including American Jews.”
Brooke nodded. “Some of my acquaintances are more discerning—my closest friend, in particular. But the survival of Israel is too visceral for easy detachment. There’s no equivalent for Gentiles I can think of.”
“So how did you become interested in our benighted area of the world?”
“So many questions,” Brooke answered with a smile. “But I suppose I asked for this. You did threaten to find out if I were smart.”
To his surprise, Anit seemed disconcerted, then gave him a sideways grin. “People tell me I’m direct.”
“‘People’ are right, and I don’t mind. As to the Middle East, at first it was more of an intellectual interest. The turning point for me was a junior year at American University in Beirut.” Brooke took another sip of his drink. “I decided to travel anywhere there wasn’t a war: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan. Also the West Bank and Gaza and, of course, Israel. There’s nothing like actually seeing places to change the way you view them.”
Anit nodded her understanding. “I agree. So how did your travels help?”
“In several ways. There’s no ‘Middle East,’ I discovered, but a number of them. There are sclerotic autocracies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the battle between modernism and fundamentalism roiling beneath. There’s Lebanon, a magnet for every troublemaker there is, whose relationship to Israel became so poisoned by war that it spawned Hezbollah. To visit the border between Lebanon and Israel was instructive in itself: Shia badlands on one side, green Israeli farms on the other, separated by an electrified fence—”
“I know,” Anit interjected quietly. “I’ve spent time there. But tell me what you thought of Israel.”
Brooke paused to organize his thoughts. “I admired it,” he answered. “As a society, it’s energetic and contentious, with a great strain of optimism. But I also felt a corrosive fear. You were right the other night: The occupation of the West Bank is a horror—checkpoints seething with hatred between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians who are treated like cattle. I met students who spent three hours making a forty-minute trip from home to school.” He softened his tone. “I know why Israel feels stuck there. But you can’t stay much longer, or else Palestinians not yet born will die hating Israel. Some will take Israelis with them.”
Anit waved wisps of smoke away from her face. “No doubt you’re right,” she said evenly. “But it is we who have to live the problem. I’m not so sure that history will give us choices.”
Despite the mildness of her tone, Brooke felt a touch defensive. “I don’t expect to live the problem,” he answered. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
“Believe me, I prefer that you do. And I’m sure you’ll be a very good professor.” Seeing Brooke’s smile, she answered with her own. “Was that too condescending?”
“Depends on how you define ‘too,’” he answered amiably. “But in other ways you’re right. Life in academia is not a high-stakes enterprise. I’ll have plenty of time to write and still lead a very pleasant life.”
She flicked back a strand of hair. “Listening to music?” she asked lightly.
“And competing. In high school and college, I played every sport I could. If I were a dog, I’d be the one who goes running after sticks. I can always bait my students, I suppose.”
The noise around them was thickening now, the slow build of anticipation in a crowd awaiting music. For his own liking, Brooke had learned far too little about Anit Rahal. “You spent time at the border,” he probed. “Was that part of your military service?”
Anit hesitated. “Almost all of it,” she said at length. “I wanted to serve in a combat unit, which was not allowed. So I became an officer in military intelligence, stationed along our borders with Lebanon or the West Bank.”
“What did that involve?”
“Internal security.” She finished her wine, her gaze more distant than before. “Much of our job was keeping terrorists from crossing into Israel. And killing the ones who did.”
Brooke stared at her. “You, personally?”
“Not unless you count giving the orders. But I saw enough of the dead—the Arabs killed by our soldiers.” She paused again, adding quietly, “As for the Jews who died the time we failed—a suicide bombing at a café—I could only imagine them.”
For a moment she studied the table, as if parsing her own memories.
Mustering a dispassionate tone, Brooke said, “It’s not easy for me to imagine any of it.”
Anit kept her eyes down. “In certain ways one grows hardened. Sometimes, usually at night, our soldiers would kill terrorists as they came in. The first lesson we learned was to pat down the bodies, to ensure they weren’t booby-trapped with explosives. Otherwise we might die at the hands of a corpse.” Anit looked up at him. “Handling the dead isn’t nice, nor were we nice to them. We’d roll the bodies up in a blanket and throw them on a truck to be buried in a wasteland reserved for Arabs. Some nights we stacked them up like firewood.”
Brooke tried to envision her doing this. “How old were you?”
“The first time? Nineteen.” She shook her head, as if dismissing some painful image. “The harder part was knowing what might happen if we failed. But the work was necessary, and I learned that I was capable of doing it.”
A veil, Brooke noticed, seemed to have fallen across her dark, expressive eyes. “That must have been draining,” he ventured. “Intellectually and emotionally.”
“It’s also a condition of our lives, the difference between Israel and America. No one has attacked the American mainland in the last two hundred years. The borders I was guarding were merely cease-fire lines, recognized by no one, with enemies on almost every side.” Anit paused, her expression pensive and resigned. “We chose to live in Israel, I know. But it’s a little harder to enjoy the shopping mall when a suicide bomber might blow it up.”
“And yet you advocate reconciliation.”
Anit gave a fatalistic shrug. “What choice is there when the alternative is to remain bound to each other by hatred? Four days ago, Ariel Sharon—the butcher of Sabra and Shatilah—deliberately taunted the Palestinians by setting foot on the Temple Mount, sacred ground to both Jews and Palestinians. The result has been riots and a new wave of suicide bombings.” Her tone held quiet outrage. “According to Arafat, they’re a spontaneous reaction to Sharon’s provocation. This I don’t believe. Arafat needed an excuse to pressure Israel through violence; his violence serves Sharon’s ambition to become prime minister. Each is the other’s doppelganger.
“Many Israelis would disagree
. This much I know. In the last few days, nearly a thousand Jews have died. Sharon cannot be surprised.”
Brooke detected sadness beneath her anger. “Was anyone you know hurt?”
“No one I knew well. But a cousin of an army friend, a sixteen-year-old girl, was killed walking to school in Jerusalem. And here I am, studying the Arab world in Greenwich Village.”
Brooke felt the pulse of sympathy, both for the woman in front of him and the girl he did not know. “I’m sorry,” he said bluntly. “But at the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that you’re not manning the border has nothing to do with that.”
She smiled without much humor. “Oh, I know. Only children believe that their every action affects the world. But Israeli lives are precious to me, and to my family. My great-grandfather was among the early Zionists; my grandmother survived the Holocaust. To us, history is a living thing, and to survive we must continue to shape it.” Her smile became more genuine. “No doubt that sounds egocentric. But I expect your ancestors did not flee some pogrom in Poland, but arrived here safely on the Mayflower.”
“Not quite. Though my great-great-great-grandfather Chandler was a general in the Revolutionary War.”
Anit arched her eyebrows. “American or British?”
“American,” Brooke answered blithely. “Still, I grant that our history is less immediate.”
“And accepting facts more volitional. For Israelis, ours are inescapable.”
At the front of the room, a stagehand was adjusting the sound system, suggesting the music was about to begin. Facing this complex woman, Brooke resolved to make himself clear. “There’s something I want you to understand, Anit. As a male, as my parents’ son, and—above all—as an American at the end of the American Century, I’m fully aware that I enjoy a surfeit of good luck. But it’s better to know that than to believe I’ve earned it. Or to apologize for it.”
She looked into his face. “If I’ve made you feel that, I’m sorry. Perhaps a part of me envies you a little. But I also have my privileges, like studying for a year in America. And sitting in this bar with you.”
It was a pretty enough apology, Brooke thought, the more so for its honesty. “So let’s enjoy the music,” he suggested.
“Let’s,” she agreed. “In an hour, the world will still be waiting.”
For Brooke, that night the performers were particularly delightful, the weave of voice and instruments complex yet infectious. But what made his evening so memorable was the expression on Anit’s face, the desire for music to transport her completely. To see her so unguarded was to perceive another woman beneath, carefree and alive to pleasures.
They lingered for a nightcap, Anit asking more about the music, then chatted comfortably on the way to her dormitory north of Houston.
They stood in its shadow, suddenly out of words. “Thank you,” Anit said simply, and stuck out her hand.
When he did not let it go, she looked directly into his face, dark eyes questioning.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said.
Her look of inquiry lingered, and then she smiled a little. “All right,” she answered. “Next time I’ll try to be a little less self-righteous.”
On the way home, Brooke decided that she was worth another mention to Ben. He had never met a woman quite like her.
EIGHT
For hours of darkness, Al Zaroor traversed the harsh, rocky earth in the garb of a Baluch tribesman, his path guided by the stars and a GPS.
Shortly before dawn, he reached the road to Quetta. Soon a pickup pulled up beside him. Leaning through the window, its driver inquired in Pashto, “Do you need a ride, brother? Or do you prefer walking?”
Smiling in relief, Al Zaroor spoke the scripted words: “A ride, thank you. I still have far to go.”
Getting into the cab, Al Zaroor noted that the man was young, with a beard that partially concealed the chubby face of an infant. One would not guess that he was the trusted nephew of someone who, excluding Mullah Omar, was perhaps the most powerful man in the Taliban stronghold of Quetta. As they drove, Al Zaroor perceived that Abdul Zia had taught his nephew well. The young man knew the virtues of silence.
Bone-weary, Al Zaroor settled down in his seat, allowing himself to be hypnotized by the barren flatness filling the window. His senses came alive only when he saw the barrier ahead, manned by Pakistani police. Glancing at the driver as he braked, Al Zaroor read the indifference in his eyes.
The middle-aged policeman approached the truck with the defeated trudge of a man imprisoned by bureaucracy. Seeing the driver’s face, he nodded and waved them through. As with the others at the barrier, he seemed indifferent to Al Zaroor or the contents of the truck. No words were needed for Al Zaroor to know that their salaries were supplemented by Abdul Zia.
As Al Zaroor had told Bin Laden, this was the lifeline of his plan.
A few hours later Al Zaroor and Zia’s nephew had reached Quetta, a dusty outpost near the Afghan border run by drug dealers and the Taliban, where the presence of Mullah Omar was an open secret.
Al Zaroor had always found Quetta engaging in a hardscrabble way. It was a frontier town in all respects: The buildings were shabby and dun-colored; the roads potholed and dirty; such trees as existed scruffy; the backdrop of jagged mountains forbidding and severe. Covered women and bearded men in tribal garb, Pashtuns and Baluchs, clustered at open-air markets selling meat and fruit. Much of its quirky appeal, Al Zaroor decided, derived from the bright multicolored buses that rumbled among the camels, motorcycles, and ancient, beat-up cars. Another of its charms was historical: Revolutionaries by temperament, fierce Islamists by tradition, the locals hated the Pakistani army and police. Prudent representatives of government comported themselves so as not to end up dead.
Warlord and smuggler Abdul Zia exercised unquestioned power from a sprawling villa carved into the amphitheater of mountains overlooking the city. As they climbed the khaki-colored hillside, Al Zaroor felt entwined in the weave of ferocity, loyalty, and money that ensured Zia’s own survival. Al Zaroor would be safe here; Abdul Zia was a serious man.
He had first come one year before, at night.
The open room where Al Zaroor and Zia had dined on an ornate carpet commanded a sweeping view of Quetta that, despite its squalor, was electrified for miles, its lights casting an upward glow into the clear night sky. Placed before them were generous servings of lamb, chicken, yogurt, okra, bread, and sweets—a roll of deep-fried batter dunked in sticky sugar syrup. If Al Zaroor were to die here, it would be from the desserts.
Their dinner was quiet, the conversation courtly and indirect. In the flesh Zia confounded Al Zaroor’s imaginings—he was slender, gray-bearded, and bespectacled, with the subdued, reflective manner of a scholar or an actuary. There was little to suggest the hardened man who could smuggle drugs or arms through Baluchistan at will, or order an enemy murdered because he wished it. Only after several hours did Zia’s quiet bitterness emerge—an American drone attack on the Taliban had accidentally killed his oldest son.
Al Zaroor knew this, of course. Hatred had seared into Zia that smuggling drugs held a meaning beyond family tradition—he was poisoning the children of the West. Zia knew, or guessed, Al Zaroor’s affiliation: They had come together through a trusted intermediary, a relative of Zia’s known to Amer since they had fought together in Afghanistan. Hatred was their bond.
“This shipment,” Zia inquired thoughtfully, “it will have great value to you?”
“And to my cause. That’s why I seek to entrust it to your protection, and to pay as you deserve.” A decorous way, Al Zaroor thought, to describe a million dollars.
Zia nodded his acknowledgment. “You are wise.”
“And discreet. No one else can know of its importance.”
Zia gave a fractional shrug, a movement of the shoulders beneath his crisp white robe. “To the others, its nature will not matter. Those who move it will be the most disciplined men I have. They will know tha
t any lapse in security will cause their death, and that of their family. No one will sell you to outsiders.”
“And beyond Pakistan?”
“This depends on where you wish to go.”
Al Zaroor considered his answer. “To start, let us say in and around the Persian Gulf.”
Zia touched his lips. “I don’t need specifics yet. But in certain Middle Eastern countries my network is ironclad. Allowing for changes in local conditions.”
“We have our connections as well. If conditions become more challenging—and I think they will—perhaps our forces can complement each other.”
Zia paused to consider the implications of the statement, and what it might suggest about the shipment. “Are there other considerations we should discuss?”
“Yes. I also wish for you to smuggle me.”
Zia’s mouth moved in the brief semblance of a smile. “I thought as much. Transporting a stranger presents no problem. Such as it is in Baluchistan, the army fears us. So do the police. As generous men, we also pay them.”
“Still,” Al Zaroor parried, “mischance is random, and strikes us all. How do you arrange safe passage for a specific shipment at a preordained time?”
“That’s not how we operate, my friend. We never inform our sources in the government about the time or date of an operation, or what is being moved. We merely tell them that we have activities in their area that should not be disturbed.” Zia spread his hands. “You seem to know Pakistan well enough. Low-level functionaries, and their bosses, routinely accept gratuities. When the payment comes from us, they also know that loyalty ensures a longer life.” The wispy smile returned. “Those few with moral qualms may guess that this particular shipment of heroin is leaving Pakistan rather than going to the ‘shooting galleries’ that pervade their cities. What a pathetic ruin this so-called country has become.”
A feudal ruin, Al Zaroor thought but did not say, in which you play a part.
Zia snapped his fingers, causing two obsequious menservants to remove their meal. “As to the men who’ll guide you,” he continued, “they’ll be extremely well armed and skilled. Several were trained by the ISI to fight in Afghanistan or Kashmir. Faced with them, officials in Baluchistan know better than to be brave.”
The Devils Light Page 10
