But clearly, my having emptied the camera would work against me.
The other cop had finished getting details from the car rental company. They saw that my passport checked out against the information they had, asked where I was staying, and then called the Intercontinental as well. The officer with the camera showed the “Empty” command to his partner, and the drawings as well and that, apparently, convinced him. They told me to get into the patrol car.
“But why?” I asked indignantly. “And what about my car?”
“Lock it, and after further questioning at the station, we’ll bring you back to it,” said the cop, still politely, but firmly.
“Why shouldn’t I drive behind you to the station?” I asked innocently.
“Lock your car and come with us,” said the cop, with increasing impatience.
I did as I was told and sat in the backseat of the police car. Even before they drove off, I thought I could waste both of them, or at least knock them out and run away. I could punch one of them in the back of his neck, which would stun him for a good few seconds, and then strangle the other one until he lost consciousness, or gave up the ghost, and then go back to deal with number one. There was almost nothing moving outside, and nothing would move inside the vehicle either. I would get out, start my car, and drive away. If they were dead, I’d have enough time to get out of Jordan in an orderly fashion: it would take time before someone would be able to check and discover that their last communication had been about me. Friedlich’s passport might be spoiled or even burned, but I would be somewhere safe.
But I knew this wasn’t a real option. The killings in Warsaw still lay heavily on my conscience. No one had authorized me to liquidate two innocent Jordanian cops to get myself off the hook. Jordan wasn’t an enemy country and my chances of persuading their superior officer of my innocence seemed reasonable.
A few minutes later we were in the courtyard of the police station. The moment we entered, all the possibilities for violent action that were still running around in my head melted away, and I forced myself to switch from combat mode to the cover story that fitted the situation I found myself in: an innocent Canadian tourist who had no idea why he had been picked up.
I was led into the duty officer’s room, which was behind the reception desk in the entrance hall of the small station. The cop who had brought me in gave the officer a lengthy explanation of the reasons for his action, pointing at the camera and the drawings. The officer sent him out with the drawings, apparently to check out the houses I’d sketched, and sat me down facing him for the preliminary interrogation.
The duty officer, a man of about fifty, with a neat moustache and a freshly pressed uniform, was still polite at this stage. I assumed this wasn’t his own office, because the walls were full of pennants and photographs of many different men in police uniform. In polished English, and an accent very reminiscent of the late King Hussein’s, he asked me for my personal details, my reasons for visiting Jordan and what I was doing in the refugee camp. I gave a brief account of my cover story, and wound up by saying I had no idea that I had been in a refugee camp and what I pictured when I heard the words “refugee camp” were rows of tin huts or tents with strips of bare earth between them. In my eyes, it had been a residential neighbourhood, full of interesting little houses, and I’d simply been driving around in my car seeking out exotic places that I could draw. And, while we were about it, I wanted to get my car out of there urgently if it really was a refugee camp.
The officer listened attentively, made notes on a form in front of him, and then picked up the phone.
“You are right about the car. I have just ordered a tow truck to bring it here,” he told me. “I need your keys.”
“Why don’t you just release me, and let me get it myself? And why don’t you tell me why I’ve been detained?”
Apologizing, he said, “We haven’t yet finished your investigation.”
“I intend on remaining in Jordan for a few days. I can come back here if there’s a need. I don’t see what the problem is.”
“As you apparently do not realize, the problem is that you erased everything in your camera when the officer approached you, and you have made very precise sketches of a number of houses, and we want to find out who lives there. This activity of yours does not seem innocent. But if it turns out that there are no problems, you’ll be released forthwith.”
“I don’t understand all this. Am I under arrest?”
“You are detained for questioning.”
I handed over the car keys, and the officer left me. If he discovered that Palestinian militant activists lived in the houses that I’d drawn, the noose would tighten around my neck. Again, I weighed up the chances of escape. I could see the desk at the entrance to the building, around which a number of cops with nothing better to do were clustered. I couldn’t walk out without them noticing me. To run away from a police station with armed cops on my tail was not a reasonable thing to do, and besides my cover story could still pass any test of reasonability.
I could hear the officer talking on the phone. From the little Arabic I had acquired, I understood things were getting grimmer. He returned with a serious expression on his face.
“Do you know whose houses you were drawing?”
“No. Just interesting buildings.”
“More interesting than you think – or want to say. I’ll have to pass you on to the chief interrogator. I have summoned him and he’s on his way.”
“You’re wasting your time and mine.”
“Very sorry about your time; as for our time – this is why we get our salaries.”
He asked me to follow him and this time there was an armed cop behind us. We walked along a corridor lined with apparently empty offices, until he opened the door of one of them and asked me to wait there. Inside was a table and two chairs, the walls were whitewashed, and there was a small barred window. I sat down and the door behind me was slammed shut and locked. From the sounds outside, I concluded that the officer had left, and the cop had remained outside to guard me.
When the door opened, I seemed to wake up from a little nap because I had no sense of elapsed time. This didn’t surprise me much, because I remembered what had happened once when I’d been arrested during my training and taken to a police station not knowing what to expect and how long I’d be there. For some reason I was locked into a toilet cubicle – perhaps there were no vacant holding cells – and to gather my strength I sat on the toilet seat, put my feet up on the door handle, and fell asleep, something that raised quite a few laughs when they came to get me. “The daddy of all the don’t-cares” said the cop who opened the door, and he didn’t stop telling anyone who would listen.
The interrogation officer was a different type from those who’d been dealing with me so far. He was young and energetic with a hard face. He was wearing a jacket, an open-necked pink shirt, blue trousers and sports shoes. His English was excellent.
“What does the name Halil Abu Zaweid mean to you?”
I didn’t recognize the name from my list of targets, until I realized that he pronounced it differently from what I thought it was. I kept silent, while I was working this out.
“Jamal Zakhut?”
My response was the same.
“Mustafa Shehadeh?”
This time he pronounced the name in the same way as Moshik, the intelligence officer.
I looked my interrogator in the eye and said, “I have never heard any of these names.”
“These are the names of the people whose houses you have drawn. And do you know what they have in common?”
“That they have nice stone houses, with bougainvillea and flowers in pots,” I said. A grimace flickered across his face.
“Don’t be smart with me. Who sent you to draw these particular houses?”
“They caught my eye as I was passing through the neighbourhood. I hadn’t any idea who lives in them.”
The interrogator placed my camer
a on the table.
“Can you explain this?” and he pointed at the “Empty card?” query and the “Yes” command.
“Yes I can. At home I inserted an old card by mistake. It was full of pictures from my previous trips, and I decided to empty it so I could take pictures here,” I rattled out the reply that I had cooked up since being detained. The “contingencies and responses” that I’d worked on at the facility had not included this situation.
“Wouldn’t it have been more logical to buy a new card?”
“I wouldn’t have found my way back to the place, and anyway I’d uploaded the whole card onto my computer at home long ago, so I wasn’t losing anything.”
One might have thought that would satisfy him, but I was aware of what he wasn’t telling me – that he knew that I’d made drawings of the homes of three Fatah key officials with whose identity he was certainly familiar. He began questioning me on every move I’d made since arriving in Jordan. Again I thought that I was convincing, telling him at length about all the sites I’d visited, my trip to Petra, the restaurants I’d dined at. Obviously, I said nothing about my preliminary recon of my targets. But the matter of the Fatah officials was still unexplained. He began to ask me about my home, my studies and what I did in Canada.
I gave him all the details, even adding the names of the galleries where my pictures were sold. I mentioned the drawings I’d made in the desert. When he asked about my family, I told him that, as he could see from my passport, I had been travelling outside Canada for years, my parents were no longer alive and I was not in touch with any relatives. For a moment I had a blood-curdling thought: the deceased Ron Friedlich was killing off his very much alive parents. The thought of his parents was enough to reawaken that pity I felt for them. I felt Ron Friedlich in my bloodstream. When I told his story, I was Ron Friedlich.
“But you were in Canada last October,” said my inquisitor after studying the passport. The Mossad had made sure I’d have the right stamps there, to fit in with my renting the apartment and the other cover-establishment activities I’d undertaken in Toronto.
“Right. I was thinking of going back and settling down there. Since then I’ve been invited to several places on photographic assignments.”
“So I see. Rather strange variety of destinations, no?”
“I am a painter and photographer of nature. I like drawing in exotic places, and I have photographed bird migrations from Eastern Europe to Asia and the Middle East and back again.”
His face remained blank. I had no idea what impression my cover story had made on him, and whether my explanations for my travels held water, whether birds actually migrated to and from these places and at those times. He told me everything would be checked and if it was all true, I’d be released. Until then, I had to remain in the detention room.
I really didn’t like the idea of being detained not least because I would have to explain afterwards why I hadn’t managed to talk myself out of it.
For a moment I thought of demanding that the Canadian consulate be contacted. Six or seven years ago, after the abortive attempt to do away with the Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, the Mossad operatives who were caught also had Canadian passports and they had done just that but, after speaking to them, the consul had told the cops that “Whatever these guys are, they aren’t Canadians.” I was confident this wouldn’t happen to me, that I could pass a brief questioning and the consul would back my story, but didn’t want to take the risk. It could easily develop into a situation in which the consulate would locate the Friedlichs, who would ask to speak to their missing son, and the whole structure would come tumbling down.
My detention lasted longer than I thought it would and even when everything I said had checked out, after almost two full days, I was still being held. Twice I banged on the door and demanded to be released. I knew this wouldn’t help, but I didn’t want it to look as if I had accepted what they were doing and thereby indicate that I was guilty.
Luckily, the detention conditions at the police station were tolerable. I was placed in a regular office room, with a camp bed, a table and a chair. There was a small window, through which came mainly cold air and occasional drops of rain. A jug of water and a glass were on the table, and a bucket in the corner served as a toilet. It was emptied once a day, and the rest of the time I had to live with the smell, but I soon discovered that a person learns to live with his own odours and it’s only the odour of the excreta of others that is repellant.
Three meals a day were brought to the room, and they were reasonable for prison fare. The cops didn’t treat me as an enemy, and not even as a criminal detainee: In fact they seemed to be quite indifferent, and that suited me. The problem was time, which went by at an excruciatingly slow pace, especially at night, when it was too cold to fall asleep. I had too much time to reflect upon all the things that I would have been better off forgetting, under the circumstances. Mainly, of course, Niki, and where I would have been now, if I’d gone with my love, and where I was now because I didn’t.
It is failure that designates the limits of our abilities, I mused. And to be imprisoned in Amman, in a semi-friendly country, clearly showed the limits of my ability as a secret agent. A cautious man, more versatile and skilled than me, would not have ended up here. It was clear to me that my potential for contributing to my nation as a secret agent was inferior to my potential as a painter or a lover.
Above all, I felt personal failure, but I also had a sense of being covered by a protective layer. It was as if these things were happening to someone else and, at the end of the affair, I’d be freed. The most unpleasant thing then would be having to explain what happened when I returned to HQ. I had after all executed almost my entire mission.
They kept me locked up that night, the next day and a further night. I was beginning to feel weighed down. Something had gone wrong. They wouldn’t do this to an innocent Canadian tourist.
And then I was taken back to the interrogation room, and the same officer appeared. He was wearing a pink shirt again. I couldn’t complain because I was also wearing the same clothes, except mine, unlike his, were creased and sweaty.
“We have verified most of your details,” he said, “and you may even be happy to hear that one of the galleries – one second,” he looked at his papers, “‘art gallery’ is all I have here, said they’ve been looking for you because they’ve sold two of your pictures. They asked us to inform you that they’re holding three thousand Canadian dollars for you.”
It’s a subject for psychological research, how a marginal detail like that can make someone happy, in a very unhappy situation like the one I was in. Nevertheless, I began to feel a little optimistic. I had learned two things, both about myself and in general: firstly, receiving recognition as an artist made me very happy, even though I really didn’t need to have any doubts on the matter; and secondly, I had a natural tendency to assume things would work out. Not only for myself, with the detention and the investigation, but generally. In Israel, we believed the Intifada would come to an end and there’d be peace with the Palestinians, although no one knew how; cancer patients believe they’ll be cured, and people in general think they’ll never die – everyone else would, of course, but not themselves, through some miraculous means which they never bother to try to clarify for themselves. And now, somehow, the little compliment I’d received gave me a distinct sense that soon I’d be a free man.
“I’ll be honest with you,” said the officer. “We don’t have too many problems with you, apart from your having done some unreasonable and suspicious things, and your explanations are not completely satisfactory. You know what they are. Apart from that, you look and sound OK. It’s fifty-fifty from our point of view. Lucky for you this is the Hashemite Kingdom and not one of the other countries around here. There, you’d never get out, but for us to let you go, we do need a tiny drop more than what we’ve got.”
“Like what? You’ve already held me here for three days for nothing.
Soon my visa will expire, and then you’ll arrest me for that.”
The officer smiled. “Don’t worry about that. What we need is something definite, some totally positive identification, and we haven’t got that.”
“And what can I do about that?”
“You think about it. What can give us that positive identification that you are who you say you are. Not some answering machine that gives your name in your voice in Toronto, but someone who knows you, who’ll speak to you and then tell us you are who and what you say you are.”
“And if there is no one like that?”
“Again, I’ll be honest. In that case, we’d tend to take a graver view of the case.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you haven’t got it yet, let me make it clear: your case borders on being a security incident.”
“Me? Security?” My voice was choked.
“I’m not supposed to tell you, but I’ll tell you anyway. The neighbourhood you were driving around in is a bad one, one that our intelligence keeps an eye on. And the houses you drew belong to people who are intelligence targets.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What’s an intelligence target?”
“What you’ve understood, you’ve understood. And what you haven’t, you haven’t. The problem is that they can also be intelligence targets of foreign espionage agencies. And that’s why we tend to play it safe.”
“And what does that mean?”
It means that we won’t decide by ourselves whether to release you, which is what I would do right now, but we’d hand you over to the Mukhabarat. They would decide what to do with you.”
“Listen, Mr – what’s your name?”
“Na’im. Call me Na’im.”
“You’ve been holding me for three days and my patience is at an end, Mr Na’im. It’s not legal, it’s not reasonable and it’s not acceptable. I understood that you had some sort of a problem, but that’s it. You’ve got all the answers you wanted!”
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 21
