The Lie: A Novel

by Hesh Kestin

  As soon as they hear the tumblers fall in the lock, Gadi kicks in the door, knocking the man inside to the floor as at the same time the two naval commandos rappel through the room’s rear windows in a crescendo of exploding glass.

  “Do not shoot! I am unarmed! Do not shoot!”

  It is all over. Thirty men are now in the room, rifles pointed down at the man on the floor. With a nod toward an interior door, Gadi signals his men to secure the rest of the apartment. He turns to Kobi. “Your prisoner.”

  In a quick scan of the room, Kobi has already seen the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table, next to it a pack of Liban cigarettes. This is Heavy Smoker. “What is your name, commander?” he says in Arabic with a mixture of charm and reserve. It is as if the intelligence officer and the man on the floor are meeting at a cocktail party at one of the casinos in the hills east of the city, a couple of princelings from any of a dozen Arab countries out for an evening of the kind of alcohol-fueled revelry that is forbidden at home.

  The man on the floor looks up with an expression of bemused self-interest. “I trust you will understand about the papers. My superiors would not look kindly upon me if they learned I gave up secrets. I could die by knife in your prisons.”

  “Name.”

  “Tawfeek Nur-al-Din, lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613.”

  “Where are the two Israeli soldiers, colonel? I will not ask this question again.”

  “Tawfeek Nur-al-Din, lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613.” He smiles. “By the rules of the Geneva Convention, I demand to be treated properly as a prisoner of war according to my rank as a uniformed officer.”

  Kobi steps back. “Your prisoner, Gadi.”

  “Medic!”

  “I am not injured.”

  “Medic, treat this man.”

  The medic looks at his commanding officer.

  “If you will permit me to stand, I will demonstrate—”

  His words are cut off by a muffled gunshot. In the closed room, the efficient silencer causes it to sound like thick fingers snapping. The Hezbollah commander is screaming in agony.

  “You have another knee, habibi.”

  “Tawfeek Nur-al-Din,” he says through his teeth. “Lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613. What you have done is in contravention of the Geneva Accords regarding treatment of prisoners of war! I am bleeding!”

  Gadi looks at his watch. “A bit. Meanwhile, as much as it would give me pleasure to do this limb by limb, we don’t have the time.” He kneels beside the man and, with his knife, deftly slices through trousers and underwear in one motion. He holds the man’s genitals in one hand, the knife in the other. “Colonel . . .”

  All color drains from the man’s face. “Please, please! Do not do this!” All his bravado is gone. “I know nothing of Israeli soldiers. I am—”

  “Madam . . .” Gadi says with a smile.

  “Al-Fasi Street!” the prisoner blurts. “The Barbour Quarter!”

  Kobi steps forward. “What number?”

  “Seventeen. Number seventeen. The first floor!”

  “Ground floor or one flight up?”

  “No stairs. As you enter.”

  “How are they guarded?”

  “Two men inside. Two outside. Please!”

  Gadi rises. “You can keep your testicles, colonel.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much.”

  “My pleasure,” Gadi says. “Only one thing more.”

  “Yes, please, anything!”

  “The Geneva Convention does not apply to terrorists.”

  The men holding Lt. Col. Tawfeek Nur-al-Din drop him and move to the side. Gadi does not waste any time. They are not in a position to take prisoners. At this range the 9mm shells are of sufficient velocity to exit the skull and bury themselves in the wooden floor.

  75

  As the Mercedes limousine moves through the streets followed by the ambulance, Kobi, Gadi, and three others change into the Hezbollah uniforms that had been stored in the limousine’s trunk. In the tight confines of the automobile, one of the white ritual fringes tucked under Kobi’s combat uniform manages to escape. Six inches descend from his belt at the rear like a horse’s tail. No one notices.

  76

  Number 17 Al-Fasi Street is guarded by two Hezbollah fighters

  who stand smoking on either side of the double doorway.

  “Greetings, my brothers,” Gadi hails them in Arabic. “Is it quiet?”

  “Quiet like death. Ten minutes earlier there was much gunfire from that direction. Do we know you?”

  “Replacements, courtesy of Col. Tawfeek. There was a bit of trouble with the Christians.” He draws his finger across his throat. “Now no more Christians, no more trouble.”

  “We wondered.”

  Gadi pulls a folded sheet from his pocket. “Col. Tawfeek sends his greetings. New orders.”

  “When then are we expected to sleep?” the second Hezbollah asks. It is the infantryman’s universal complaint.

  “Now,” Gadi says.

  The silenced Micro Tavors of the two commandos by his side make so little sound the militiamen seem to fall of their own will.

  In an instant the unit is inside the building, Gadi knocking quietly on the one door on the ground floor. The dark of the hallway is broken by a shaft of light as a peephole slides open.

  “Your relief detail is here,” Gadi says into it.

  “Thanks be to God.”

  The door opens, revealing a kitchen with a propane cooktop, a small refrigerator trembling on rusted-out, uneven feet, a sink piled high with dishes and a counter cluttered with empty cans of Libni-Cola, and a box of 7.62x39mm ammunition, standard for the two Kalashnikov rifles leaning placidly in the far corner.

  “Make yourselves comfortable,” the militiaman says at the door. He is a good deal older than the militiamen in the street, maybe fifty, probably chosen for guard duty because he is past his prime—and has more to lose. The Hezbollah leadership prefers its killers young. They are more willing to die. That is why suicide bombers are rarely even twenty-one. The militiaman returns to a small folding table by the shuttered window where he and his partner appear to be near the end of a game of chess, only a few pieces left on the board. An ancient Webley revolver, its bluing rubbed away from years of use, sits on the table between them, probably to be carried when they check on the prisoners—in close quarters a Kalashnikov is impractical. “There is coffee, but the milk has become cheese,” he says. “If you will wait one moment while I reduce this amateur to a pulp, I will wash some cups. Housekeeping is not our strength.”

  “Where are the prisoners?”

  The militiaman motions casually to the door opposite with the rook he has just taken. “Secure within.” He has eyes only for the chessboard. “Check.”

  “Keys?”

  “Unlocked. Precisely the opposite of my opponent’s position.” He laughs. “Mate in one move, Jabril.”

  “Unlocked?” Gadi says. “Is that wise?”

  “If they live another hour I will be surprised. Soon enough they will be in hell, together with all Jews and Christians.” He spits, then loses interest in theology to return his attention to the chessboard as his opponent shifts his queen. In quick response, as though doing a particularly delicate bit of surgery, he eases a knight into place. “And . . . mate!” Beaming, he turns toward Gadi and Kobi as they move toward the opposite door. What he sees causes him to stop in the middle of his celebratory howl: Kobi’s ritual fringes trailing behind him.

  “Jews! Jews are here!” He grabs the revolver from the table and fires. A revolver is dependable that way. With no safety it is the ultimate weapon of instinct.

  Before the other chess player can rise both militiamen are cut down. One falls to the floor, the other onto the chessboard, the pieces flying.

  Gadi speaks into his helmet-microphone. “Medical team on the double. Medical team—now!”


  While one of the commandos applies a pressure bandage to stanch the bleeding from Kobi’s back, Gadi and the others rush through the door into the second room. Salim is squatting in a corner, talking to himself about a horse. On the stained cement floor Ari lies unconscious.

  77

  In Caesarea, Dahlia climbs out of the pool, wrapping one towel around her hair and another around her naked body. She lights a cigarette and stands smoking for a while. Then she enters the living room and leans down to her husband. “Dudik, Dudik.”

  He doesn’t stir.

  “Oh, shit, Dudik. Don’t leave me alone,” she says. “I’m so scared.”

  Dudik sleeps on.

  78

  As the ambulance careens through the dark streets of Beirut Dr. Itzik works feverishly to stabilize his patient. Ari is hooked up to a respirator and an IV line but remains unconscious. Another member of the medical team injects Salim. Though strapped down, he thrashes about as though electrically shocked, his body a mass of protoplasm uncontrolled by any higher function, his mouth askew, mumbling, then shouting, then whispering in a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew. In less than a minute the sedative takes over, his body relaxes, drool dropping from the side of his mouth in a long line of spittle that slowly stretches down to the ambulance floor. The team is finally able to get an IV line into him.

  A medic checks the stretcher suspended above the Bedouin. The monitors mounted on the ambulance wall are steady but offer no other reason for optimism: heart rate sluggish, blood pressure high, temperature slowly rising. The patient’s bleeding is stanched, but there is no telling what is going on inside Kobi’s inert body. The bullet entered his back just below the line of his diaphragm. He is unconscious.

  “He wants to live. You can see that.”

  “Who doesn’t?” the other medic says. “But he doesn’t have all the time in the world.”

  “I hear he became a cop. Odd for a religious.”

  “Yeah,” the second medic says. He turns to Dr. Itzik. “No change.”

  Behind the two stretchers, the machine gunner stares determinedly at his screens as the ambulance approaches the roadblock with the burning fifty-gallon oil drums. In front of him he sees the men in the limousine firing from both sides. The machine gunner opens up as well, aiming above the limo and then swiveling the gun to cover the UN bus following behind.

  On another route, three of the four original motorcyclists, still in uniform as Police du Liban, speed through another roadblock. It is set up to stop cars. The motorcyclists zigzag through so quickly the militiamen are unable to react.

  79

  In Caesarea, Dahlia makes coffee. She thinks: What a cliché I’ve become. Modern Israeli working mother with luxury kitchen, the best appliances, two sinks, a dishwasher so silent the red lights on its electronic control panel are the only indication it is on. All this, she thinks, and I can’t remember when last I cooked a meal. Dudik stopped coming home for supper years ago, the boys live on pita and hummus, and all I do in here is make coffee and eat cold fruit out of an otherwise empty refrigerator. The milk has gone sour. She finds a tub of vanilla ice cream in the freezer and adds two tablespoons to her coffee, then puts the mug in the microwave to reheat. Would it have been different if I’d stayed home, created a welcoming nest for my husband and sons? Not much, she tells herself. Dudik still would not be coming home for supper, the boys still would have little patience for scheduled meals. It was the way she herself had grown up after her father died. Never much of a housewife, with no husband Erika had ceased preparing so much as a sandwich for her daughter. Dahlia remembers telling her mother, “I can’t eat politics.” In response Erika offered only the derisive laugh that was to harden into her very face. “They’re destroying our country, our leaders, and all you can think of is bread and jam.” She had looked hard at her mother, a daughter torn between voiced anger and mute despair. “I’ll settle for bread,” she had said. All through high school she took her daily sustenance in the school cafeteria. Only when she visited Zeinab did she have the luxury of an entire meal, seated with her aunt’s family, her “cousins”—seven of them, then six, then five, as over time they were married off and left home—and Mohammed, now Edward, who pretended she did not exist. To Dahlia it was as if she were in her proper place and he the guest. Perhaps he felt it, too.

  She is aware of Dudik’s presence before he speaks.

  “Is there coffee for me, or does that stop after the divorce filing?”

  “There’s no milk. I can—”

  “Black, then. Have you slept at all?”

  “A bit.”

  “Did you ever think,” he asks, taking down a mug from the neat stack in the cabinet above the silent dishwasher, “that if we had done something right . . .”

  “Right?”

  “Different. That this would not have happened? That everything would be . . . different? You and me, the boys. Ari . . .”

  “You’re just torturing yourself.”

  He adds sugar to the mug, three spoons. He never takes it sweet. “Who better to do the job?”

  They are both looking at the phone when, so abruptly they jump, it rings.

  80

  At 3:47 A.M. the rescue force is southbound over the Mediterranean, all personnel and the original vehicles securely repacked into the two Yasurs. Flying in formation with these is a late addition, another Yasur that is a fully staffed flying hospital carrying three patients. The six Super Apaches escort the Yasurs along the shoreline like anxious parents watching a baby’s first steps. Dr. Itzik and the battle medics who tended to the wounded in the ambulance are with their comrades in the invasion team. They have been replaced by a complete trauma unit in the flying hospital: four physicians—three of them surgeons—and six nurses. They move efficiently and purposively among the patients. Working with a portable CAT scan, within minutes the team has prioritized treatment. These are specialists.

  Unless ordered otherwise, the helicopter is en route to Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.

  The physician in charge, Major (Res.) Raz, summarizes the situation to Medical Corps HQ on the ground at Tel HaShomer in central Israel. “Medevac Aleph to Medcorps Skull. Three matchsticks. Priority one, Barr, Ariel, 35796518. Ruptured spleen, unilateral pneumothorax due to splintering of ribs five, six, and seven, plus sinister costochondral separation. Zero kidney function as result of bilateral blunt trauma. Apparent devascularization of renal pedicule. This is a priority one. Second patient, Ibn-Aziz, Salim, 29793651. Multiple blunt trauma with cranial damage, including fissuring. Encephalopathy. Myoclosis. Delirium. Extensive epidural hematoma. Circumferential nystagmus. Patient is sedated. Over.”

  From the loudspeaker: “Medcorps Skull to Medevac Aleph. Razi, you said three. Over.”

  “I beg your pardon. Three? Over.”

  “You said three matchsticks. Over.”

  Within the noisy helicopter a thick silence descends like a heavy damp quilt. Suddenly, no one is making eye contact, each of the personnel aboard finding something to stare at other than one another.

  “Medevac Aleph to Medcorps Skull. I assumed you knew. Over.”

  One of the nurses pulls a sheet over Kobi’s face.

  81

  In Dudik’s BMW they make Jerusalem in fifty-two minutes, stopping only once when a highway patrol car pulls them over near Hadera. The traffic cop has clocked them at 260 kilometers per hour on a stretch of highway marked 110. Dahlia shows her ID.

  Immediately they are off, Dudik barely able to keep up behind the flashing lights and the penetrating wa-wa of the siren that flows over them in waves, like a wake.

  Just before dawn they reach Hadassah. The head duty nurse escorts them from the lobby to a side elevator marked EMERGENCY USE ONLY. As it rises the nurse says, “Are you all family members?”

  Dahlia feels suddenly faint. She clutches Uri for support against the news. Somehow she never thought it would come like this, in an elevator, from a nurse as expressionless
as steel plate.

  “Mother, father, son,” Dudik says.

  “Is Ari adopted?”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Barr, there is the matter of blood type.”

  “Just say how he is.”

  “Mrs. Barr, I am not in a position.”

  “Put yourself in a position.”

  The doors open. Opposite them is a sign: HEMATOLOGY.

  “For the moment he’s all right. Considering.”

  “Considering?” Dahlia says.

  “Dr. Samuels will speak with you. Officially, it’s not my place.”

  Dahlia presses. “Unofficially, then. It’s our son.”

  “Unofficially, your son has suffered a good deal of internal damage. They’re working on him now.”

  “I want to see this Samuels.”

  “In time,” the nurse says, her face softening. “He is in the operating room. One of the best, London-trained. Look, we have to type your blood. It won’t take long.”

  “I want to see my son.”

  “Please, Mrs. Barr. Ten minutes. That’s all. It’s for the boy, for his good. That’s all I know.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Dahlia says even as she is eased into a chair with a single padded armrest. A young phlebotomist, pretty and black, with a peculiar accent—probably a nursing student from one of the African countries still maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel—begins to draw Dahlia’s blood. “What is this for?”

  For answer, Dudik is given her place in the chair.

  “Now the young man,” the head duty nurse says.

  “You know this is outrageous,” Dudik says. “Hadassah is opening itself up to a lawsuit for the ages. And I will name you as well—personally. We want to see our son!”

  Dahlia looks at him. Her husband’s mind works instinctively, she thinks. He is the real lawyer in the family. I am just an amateur. She stops in midthought. Was, she thinks. I was that, now I’m something else. Before her, she sees the face of Mohammed Al-Masri. Not Edward. Fuck Edward. Edward is just a coat he covers himself with. She remembers Mohammed as he was, a brilliant student who cultivated good manners to cover his anger. But we were all angry then. Angry at having to grow up to die in endless war, to see our fathers and brothers and sons killed, and now—with terror the main weapon of war and the battlefield every school and bus and café—our mothers, sisters, and daughters. At school we were angry at the killing. Mohammed was angry because there was not enough. I should have shot him. There was enough time before Kobi broke down the door. “I want to see my son,” she says with such force the African student nearly leaps away as she draws blood from Uri’s arm. “I want to see my son!”