by Tommy Tenney
Chapter Seventeen
The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2003, pp. A1, A6
. . . Last week at the United Nations, a new organization, Jews for Justice from Arab Countries, was established to seek reparations for Jewish refugees and for centuries of Muslim racism. Abraham Sofaer, himself an Iraqi Jew, states the claims of Iraqi Jews are legitimate: He notes that much of the real estate of Baghdad and central Iraq is really Jewish owned. The Israeli Ministry of Justice has set up the World Organization for Jews of Arab Countries (WOJAC) to collect reparations claims against all Arab countries: So far 25,000 forms have been filed . . . .
In Baghdad, Muslims are becoming aware of the game that is afoot: One local newspaper, Al-Saah, has noted that “returning Jews” are trying to seize Baghdad real estate. A sign on a factory bulletin board in Baghdad warns Muslims to “resist the temptation to sell anything to the Jews [lest] the money they make be turned into bullets to be used against the Palestinians.” Iraqis who endured Saddam’s rule have contempt for the Jews and Kurds now clamoring for property after years of comfortable exile.
—“LONDONER CLAIMS ANCIENT JEWISH TITLE AND A FORTUNE IN IRAQ”
* * *
PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE—REHAVIA, JERUSALEM
That evening Hadassah borrowed a page from the ancient queen with whom she shared a name and prepared dinner for her husband. The official residence of course boasted a full complement of chefs and serving staff, but every so often she liked to slip back to her days as a gourmet cook and give the staff an unexpected night
While standing over poached whitefish and broiled asparagus in the nearby private kitchen, she thought through her strategy. And when the hour came and Jacob arrived home, she and the meal were more than ready. All that remained was the lighting of the candles upon the small table she had set up in their living quarters in front of a glowing fireplace.
He arrived the way he always did, a Burberry overcoat folded over his right forearm and his cell phone unfolded in the other as he attempted to finish up his last call.
“Well,” he said with a smile as he snapped the cell phone shut and perused the table setting. “What have we here?”
“You’re going to have to endure another intelligence briefing, I’m afraid. So I thought I’d make it go down easier by presenting it Queen Esther-style. With a little fish and soft candles.”
“I think I can handle that,” he answered with a chuckle and raised eyebrows.
His arms briefly encircled her waist as he brushed her cheek with a kiss and whispered, “I’m just glad to have my queen back.”
“Then come and sit, please,” she replied with an answering smile.
She came back from the kitchen with two plates of food. He smiled as she set them on the table, sat down and held his hand.
“This must be pretty important,” he said with mock sincerity.
She nodded. “It certainly is. And I’ll wager it’s the most fruitful intel briefing you’ll have all day.”
“Oh, my dear, I hope not. My intel briefings have been growing all too fruitful, as you put it. As a matter of fact, I could use a lot more dull and boring ones at this point in my life.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.” She raised a fork to his lips. “Then taste the fish.”
They were already halfway through the meal when she finally gathered up the courage to tell him.
“I’ve found my man,” she said with forced casualness.
“What man?”
“Well, actually, my woman. I found the one who did not perish.”
“You’re kidding,” he asked, serious at first, then grinning at her coyness.
“Not at all. In the last few days I’ve had to revert to my graduate student days, back when I was hustling to document my thesis by hook and by crook. It’s taken every bit of cunning and resourcefulness I ever had back then, and more. I may have even broken a law or two—who knows? But after scouring every public record between Yad Vashem and the Smithsonian, I think I found her.”
“Well,” he asked with an impatient drawing of breath, “are you going to tell me who she is?”
“She’s my aunt Rivke. I’m sure of it. Now I just have to prove it. She was the one who supposedly died in the Holocaust. That was never true, all these years. Rivke actually made it to London with all the others and wound up marrying several years later. A man who, if old records and his own statements are correct, was from, of all places, Iraq.”
“Why, then, did your family say she had died?”
“I have no idea. And you know, the more I think about it, it’s possible I was told she had died and I just assumed it was in the Holocaust, given the times. But it’s clear: she made it through and married. The groom seems to have come from an old Jewish family. There shouldn’t have been a problem with the marriage.”
“That’s strange.”
“Well, that’s only mildly odd compared to what I’m about to tell you. See, Aunt Rivke did die eventually, in 1954. But her husband never remarried, and he’s alive today. I ran his name through the Internet and received thousands of browser hits.”
“Is he famous?”
“You might say that. He’s extremely wealthy, and rather notorious. In fact, you may have heard of him. His name is Anek al-Khalid, and he’s making a rather controversial claim in World Court of reparations for the wealth taken from Iraqi Jews over the years.”
“I’ve certainly heard about that.” Jacob stared at her over the goblet that had gone still in his hand.
“Well, there’s more. According to an intelligence report I was able to coerce from someone on your staff who shall remain nameless”—she grinned and wrinkled her nose at him—“al-Khalid has another scheme in the works. He is quietly planning to revive the office of the Leader of Jews in Exile.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“That’s right. The Exilarch.”
Jacob whistled in amazement. “You’re right. This is the most interesting briefing I’ve had in some time.”
She leaned forward, her eyes intense. “You do understand, don’t you? Remember the word Exilarch? It was part of the name of the group that killed my father! This means there must be some connection between that terrorist and this man, apparently my uncle by marriage, whose existence my family disguised for decades!”
“Of course I understand.” He reached over to clasp her chin. “What I don’t understand is, why am I getting the impression you think you’re going to London?”
“Of course I’m going. It’s the next step.” She moved back from his hand.
“Honey, I’m sorry to dictate to you, but you are not going. Not on your life. Literally. Hadassah, you don’t know anything about this man. What if he’s the one who had your father killed, out of some old personal vendetta? What if he’s an Iraqi double agent? What if he’s nuts? You already know he’s making some very troublesome claims before the World Court. What if he’s some kind of out-of-control crackpot?”
“Then at least I’ll have my answer.”
“Mossad will get the answers. I promise, I’ll have this man fully investigated and a twenty-page report on my desk in twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll take the report,” she replied with a knowing look. “And then I’ll bring it with me to London. You promised me, Jacob.”
“And you promised not to do anything unwise or unsafe. You were almost killed less than three days ago!”
“Yes! And do you know where that happened? Right here in West Jerusalem, less than a half mile from your office. Three-quarters of a mile from the last attack, at the synagogue. I seem to be in the greatest danger right here, going about my routine! Sitting right here in our quarters, coming or going in the limousine. Think about it: going to London may be the safest thing I can do right now.”
He sighed deeply. “That’s assuming you go there with adequate security.”
“Fine. You provide me with your best and most unobtrusive detail, and we’ll both be happy. But I’m going
. You know I have nothing else to cling to, other than you.” She briefly considered quoting Esther’s “If I perish, I perish,” but decided it would take her proclamation over the top. Instead, she paused.
Neither one looked at each other for an interminable moment. Then Jacob met her gaze, and a smile began to toy with the ends of his mouth, to spread along his face. He caressed her hand and slowly, gradually, started to laugh. They both knew he’d be unable to resist her.
“I would like your help,” she said with an intimate smile.
He reached again across the table and clasped both her hands in his. “Do you know what worries me?”
“Tell me.”
“The death of Ari Meyer—who was, by the way, a British citizen—and the fact that he had a document just like yours. And it came from Iraq. As did the suicide bomber who tried to kill you.”
“So you think his appearance was not a coincidence?”
He shook his head and his expression became even more sober. “I’m a head of state, honey. I’m not allowed to believe in coincidence.”
Chapter Eighteen
THE SKIES OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA—THE NEXT DAY
The Gulfstream V jet—crème de la crème of civil aviation, a business aircraft capable of flying nonstop from London to Beijing at 50,000 feet, Mach 8.5, only fifteen percent below the speed of sound, and in five-star luxury—took off without fanfare from Lod Airfield, the military side of David Ben Gurion Airport. The aircraft was secretly registered to the Israeli government and was usually employed in the “extraordinary rendition,” the discreet transport of so-called extrajudicial prisoners for interrogation in countries unimpressed with niceties like human rights. On other occasions it carried upper diplomatic echelons on top-secret negotiations.
That morning, however, the plane was carrying one official passenger on a special mission: the First Lady of Israel and a half-dozen-strong security detail, on a trans-European flight to London.
Fifteen minutes before, two Israeli Defense Force F–16s had lifted off in close succession and now flew nearly a mile off the Gulf-stream’s wing, weapons racks thick with fully armed complements of air-to-air missiles.
And at that moment, five miles over the Mediterranean, a chubby AWACS surveillance-control plane lumbered in slow circles, monitoring every inch of airspace within seventy-five miles and relaying it in small electronic bursts to the Lod control tower, then from there to a military conference room deep within the Prime Minister’s complex.
Jacob ben Yuda had held true to both his promises—he had allowed his wife to leave, and she was accompanied by the most complete security his nation could provide.
The only thing a casual observer would have noticed about the jet’s takeoff was its unusually sharp rate of climb; indeed, the Gulf-stream nearly assumed ballistic trajectory in its impatience to gain altitude. The tactic would have betrayed itself to a seasoned observer as a maneuver proprietary to military pilots, for it kept to an absolute minimum the first forty thousand feet of elevation—the space above terra firma when any flying craft was most vulnerable to small-arms fire and assorted ground-to-air attack.
Once approaching fifty thousand feet, far above the level of commercial airliners, the plane veered eastward and rocketed out over the Mediterranean Sea. Hadassah stared out her port with a calm that surprised her. The aircraft traced a largely seaborne route, avoiding the dry lands of Western Europe, out through the Strait of Gibraltar and then sharply north along the Spanish and French coasts, to the English Channel.
The F–16s, which unlike the private jet had required midair refueling during the journey, only peeled away when the Gulfstream approached British airspace two miles from Dover. Ten minutes later, a little over three hours after its departure, the jet landed at London’s Luton Airport in a driving rain and taxied for three miles along a private lane usually reserved for the royal family. At the end, along the fringe of a dense British green forest the likes of which Hadassah ben Yuda had not seen in years, awaited a large hangar with its double doors yawning open.
They taxied inside, and the suspended door slowly lowered itself to the ground. Only with the enclosure finally complete did the staircase begin to unfold from the side of the plane.
Outside, high in the canopies of oak trees lining the forest’s edge, snipers lowered their rifle barrels while below them, a van of Royal Fusillier commandos spilled out to take position.
From her leather chair at the center of it all, Hadassah now tried in vain to shake off a combination of awe and trepidation. If only her father had been here, to see all this hoopla. Of course, it had taken his death to provoke such extraordinary measures, but she chose not to dwell on that.
Instead, she fought to shake her thoughts from the one subject that had, strangely, occupied her mind for nearly the entire trip. Despite the excitement of the mission unfolding around her, her obsession had been a subject nearly three thousand years old—the life of Queen Esther as described in her family’s documents. She had carried along with her the bound copy of the ancient scrolls, unable to part with it for the trip, and today, as Israel had slipped effortlessly behind her to a seaborne horizon and then out of sight, she felt something she never had before.
It was almost as though Esther, in writing to the faceless concubine Leah, had made a promise to all the women of her family who would read the letter in years to come. An unspoken contract of sorts.
If my life can count for something, if my existence has meaning to you after all these centuries, so can yours.
I vow to you who follow, significance, meaning, and a place in history.
There were holes in the notion, of course. Mainly the fact that Leah, the very girl to whom this was addressed, seemed herself to have slipped through history’s cracks and fallen into total anonymity. If Leah, the recipient of this letter, had not escaped history’s ash heap, then what promise could there be to women of lesser bonds, so many years removed?
And yet Hadassah could not shake the idea. At times, dozing off in the comfort of her chair, she had almost heard an audible voice say to her, My dear, you are more than the wife of an important man. Follow your heart and you will make a difference . . . .
Was this her existential ego trying to make sense of the whirlwind of recent events?
In fact, this trip was officially classified as so risky that Jacob had been prevented by government policy from accompanying her. But the issue had been rendered moot when he finally had been compelled to stay behind by a last-minute Mossad briefing about the Iraqi headquarter shootout.
Yet now, watching the ungainly stairway lurch down into place outside her window, she missed her Jacob tremendously. She had strained the boundaries of their marriage in coming here, she knew that. But despite how rash it seemed in the light of recent events, she knew deep down that she had not been bluffing. There was a path here, however reckless, which compelled her to follow. And it had ignited the only spark of life she had felt in months. Maybe longer . . .
At last the stairway’s clasp announced itself with a thump, and one of the burly men with her looked out through the open cabin door. A damp, cold blast of fuel-scented air rushed in, reminding her of where she was.
She took a deep breath and rose from the Gulfstream’s luxurious armchair. Nodding silently at the lead security man, she walked out of the plane and, seeing the vast hangar before her and the dozens of men arrayed to protect her, wondered what in the world she had set in motion.
Am I crazy to be doing this? Yet it’s all I know to do . . . .
Chapter Nineteen
KENSINGTON, LONDON—LATER THAT DAY
Anek al-Khalid, aged eighty-nine, shuffled through London’s Israeli Embassy at its banquet entrance with a scowl upon his lips, an invitation in his fist, and the jaunty sway of a boxer about to dodge a Joe Louis bolo punch.
It was his traditional game-face, and he wore it well.
That is, until he glanced around him, closed his eyes, and felt h
imself transported.
It had been twelve long years since he had last stepped inside these halls, ever since he had announced his intention to press a highly controversial claim before the World Court. On behalf of his own and thousands of other Jewish Iraqi families in exile, he had filed a massive lawsuit demanding reparations for all the wealth stolen from them. The amount of money was awesome, numbering in the tens of billions of dollars, and the destabilization it could potentially cause was enormous. But his motives had been neither gain nor disruption. Anek al-Khalid, as anyone who knew him could attest, was very wealthy, carried neither debt nor abiding need for more money. But he did carry within him a huge burden of grief, regret, and even rage—and relieving himself of that burden was his real reason for taking such action.
As he had anticipated, the contentious action had caused an immediate chill in his relations with the Israeli establishment—not to mention a permanent stamp of persona non grata within some of the more squeamish circles of London’s Jewish community. Add to that his Islamic-sounding last name, and he was a virtual exile in his adopted city.
Not that his quest did not boast many closet supporters. News of the legal claim seemed to have been kept purposely quiet by even the most raucous British tabloids. To put it succinctly, the concept of an Arab country paying reparations to Jews was far too fraught with issues for most folks to comprehend or accept. To the vast Jewish majority, it simply smelled like trouble. And for a twentieth-century European Jew, trouble was not something one provoked without extraordinary cause.
That’s all right, he had always told himself. You’ll invite me to your parties again when I single-handedly win back thirty billion dollars stolen from your brothers and sisters. That is, should I live to see the day . . . .
