The Jerusalem Assassin

by Avraham Azrieli

  Etched along one side of the barrel, it read: K. v. K. 1943 Deutschland Uber Alles

  On the other side was the Hebrew word for revenge: Nekamah

  He wiped off the excess oil and cocked it. The clanking of steel sounded louder in the tight confines of the car.

  *

  At one thirty p.m., Abu Yusef gave Latif a thick bundle of cash. “After you pay for the suits, give the rest of the money to Bashir.”

  “ I can’t wait for you to see them!”

  Abu Yusef patted his behind. “Go, quick, before Bashir loses his patience.”

  Latif put his arms around Abu Yusef’s neck. “You’re so good to me.”

  “That’s right.” He breathed in the scent of shampoo from the boy’s hair. “Go, go. We’ll have plenty of time when you come back.”

  *

  With well-practiced motions, Lemmy screwed on the silencer. He put an extra magazine in the breast pocket of his jacket and replaced the cover over the dashboard storage compartment. Standing by the car, he quickly put on the trench coat and brown fedora. The Mauser fit in a special pocket sewn into the coat at the right hip, easily accessible through a zippered slit. He buttoned the coat and locked the Porsche. The red alarm light next to the steering wheel started blinking. He bent to look in the side mirror and pressed on a fake salt-and-pepper goatee.

  Once outside the parking garage, he took the corner around the opera, crossed the street, and headed down Avenue Haussmann, away from the Galeries Lafayette department store. He paused at shop fronts and pretended to examine the displays. Some had already put up their Christmas decorations, hoping to elevate shoppers’ spirits more than two months before the holiday. He took more than an hour to make sure no one was following him before he headed back to the Galeries Lafayette. It was time to get acquainted with the operational landscape.

  *

  Before Gideon and Bathsheba left the apartment, Elie repeated his instructions. They were to watch Abu Yusef’s boy toy go in, wait until he came out, and follow the green Peugeot back to the Arabs’ hideaway. But under no circumstances were they to raise any suspicions. If there was any disturbance, they must return to the apartment immediately.

  “ If you think he noticed you,” Elie said, “drop the tail and return here. We’ll get him on his next visit to the bank in Senlis.”

  Gideon was curious to know what made Elie so certain about future money transfers, but kept the question to himself. He had learned from experience that Elie Weiss divulged only the information he absolutely had to share.

  *

  Lemmy kept on the coat, fedora, and gloves. He scouted the enormous store, up and down the escalators, across each wing, in and out through different entrances. Avenue Haussmann, a six-lane road with heavy traffic and no legal parking, offered four pedestrian entries into Galeries Lafayette, with hundreds of shoppers coming and going continuously. Rue de Mogador was a side street that passed between the two blocks of the store. It was lined with cars in which husbands and chauffeurs waited. He spent a few moments examining a wall map of the store to memorize several alternative escape routes through various fire exits and loading docks.

  Standing inside the store behind the glass doors, Lemmy watched customers being dropped off and picked up on Rue de Mogador.

  At 2:43 p.m., a white Citroen arrived. Lemmy recognized Elie’s young agents-the man with a head of curls and the woman with sharp, beautiful features and close-cropped hair. They remained in the parked car.

  The minutes passed quickly. By 3:12 p.m., Lemmy was concerned. He would not wait for the green Peugeot more than thirty minutes beyond schedule.

  Inside the white Citroen, the driver kept watching the street in his side mirror.

  Another ten minutes went by. Lemmy felt the Mauser through the side of his coat. Was Elie’s information wrong? Could this be a trap?

  The couple in the Citroen began arguing. The man shook his head repeatedly. The woman suddenly bolted out of the car and ran down the street to the corner of Avenue Haussmann. Lemmy stepped closer to the glass doors to watch her. She glanced left and right over the railing that separated the sidewalk from the traffic. As she turned, her expression changed, her pace slowed to a casual stroll, and she stopped at a window display. Lemmy looked the other way and saw a green Peugeot coming down Rue de Mogador. It stopped at the curb near the entrance.

  The driver was a Middle Eastern man, about fifty. He unfolded a newspaper and began to read. There was no passenger in the car, and Lemmy realized the target had been dropped off at the main entrance on Avenue Haussmann. He was already inside!

  A flight of stairs led to the main level. Lemmy passed the counters displaying Chanel, Estee Lauder, OrLane, Shiseido, and Monteil. He circled the line of women at the cashier and took the escalators up, two steps at a time.

  Crossing the ladies’ shoes area, he noticed Paula’s favorite-Lundi Bleu.

  Another set of stairs to the right.

  Menswear.

  He passed Yves Saint Laurent, and turned left.

  Red-and-white sign: Pierre Cardin.

  The salesman at the counter smiled.

  Lemmy slowed down, looked away, pretended to browse through a rack of shirts, and approached the far end. A few customers pecked at the long racks of suits in shades of gray.

  Around the corner was a line of dressing rooms. One curtain was shut.

  His right hand slipped through the slit and gripped the ivory handle. He aimed the Mauser under the coat, barrel forward, pressed to the hip, the silencer parting the coat lapels. His finger slipped into the trigger slot.

  Shifting the curtain with his left hand, Lemmy saw a fur hat on a hook, a green coat, and a thin man in white briefs, his back to the curtain, his leg raised, poised to slip into the pants.

  Lemmy’s finger started pressing the trigger.

  The target must have sensed the movement behind him. He straightened and turned. “ Pardon,” he said in a voice surprisingly soft. “I’m almost done.” His body completed the turn, and he looked at Lemmy, no more than a foot separating them, smiling with shiny teeth against olive skin. It was a familiar smile, but there was no stopping now. The Mauser coughed twice.

  The target’s smile crumbled into a mask of terrible fear, which soon slackened into the familiar paralysis of approaching death. Two bullets, aimed to pass through the heart and lodge in the spine, instantly disabled the capacity for physical reactions, including the ability to expel a final scream. His body lost its firmness. He collapsed on the small bench and dropped to the side, resting against the wall, his eyes open wide.

  Lemmy shut the curtain, collected the two casings from the floor, and walked along the racks to the back stairway. Down one floor, he turned left at the sign Sortie – Reserve Au Personnel and pushed through a fire door. Down a set of gray-painted service stairs, left again, he jogged through a long, dim corridor. A pair of steel doors let him out onto a loading dock on Rue de Provence, a few steps from the bustle of Avenue Haussmann.

  The target’s smile flashed in Lemmy’s mind. A ghost from the past.

  No past! You’re Wilhelm Horch! A banker!

  He paused at the corner. No sirens. No screams. No fools trying to give chase.

  A moment later he was across the street and inside the door to the parking garage. He took the stairs down.

  The Porsche waited where he’d left it.

  His body began to shake. He doubled over. His knees grew weak. He took a few deep breaths, waiting for the sick feeling to pass. The image of the teenager’s face stayed with him, switching between smiles and death masks. The dark eyes glistened, then went blank.

  Back in the car, he unscrewed the silencer, repacked the Mauser in the storage compartment, and tapped the cover back into place. He took off the trench coat and fedora, removed the fake goatee, and stuffed everything behind the seats.

  As he drove out of the parking garage, two police vans raced toward the Galeries Lafayette, sirens whining. He merged wi
th traffic in the opposite direction, slipped Stravinsky into the CD player, and with the first tunes of The Rite of Spring, his breathing slowed down.

  He lowered the window and cold air filled the car. It had been a fluke of nature-the target’s eerie resemblance to Benjamin Mashash, whose face Lemmy had not seen in decades, whose face by now must have matured greatly from the face of the eighteen-year-old Talmudic scholar, Lemmy’s study-companion and best friend, back in the Neturay Karta sect in Jerusalem, a divided city on the eve of a great Mideast war.

  He stopped at a traffic light and shut his eyes, recalling Benjamin, whose eyes squinted in laughter, teeth white against the olive skin, ringlet side locks dangling on both sides of his earnest face.

  Oh, Benjamin!

  *

  “ You’re early.” Elie Weiss pointed to his watch. “What happened?”

  Gideon slumped in a chair. “A bunch of police cars appeared, a whole swarm of them, and Bashir split.”

  “ You followed him?”

  “ He drove too fast. We couldn’t keep up without being noticed.”

  Bathsheba paced back and forth. “We should have waited right there. Bashir has to return to pick up the boy. He has to!”

  “With all that police activity,” Gideon said, “we couldn’t stick around.”

  “Was there a fire in the store? Or an accident?” Elie lit a cigarette, keeping a straight face even though he knew what the arrival of police cars had meant. The job had been executed-successfully, no doubt, because Jerusalem Gerster never failed.

  “ Whatever it was,” Bathsheba said, “we’re back to square one.”

  “ We’ll catch them soon enough.” Smoke petered out of Elie’s lips with each word. “The next transfer to Senlis is our hook.”

  *

  Abu Yusef wasn’t happy when Bashir returned without Latif, reporting that the Galeries Lafayette was surrounded by police. With several guns and a few hand grenades in the Peugeot, Bashir had to get away in a hurry, but he was confident that, as the huge department store was filled with thousands of shoppers, Latif would easily melt into the crowds. “He knows the drill,” Bashir said. “He’ll walk around and check out some stores until the emergency is over. He’ll call, and I’ll drive back to Paris to get him. Don’t worry.”

  But a few hours passed, the phone didn’t ring, and Bashir fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, snoring lightly. The rest of the men, other than the sentries on duty, were in the pool house, watching an action movie with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

  By ten p.m. Abu Yusef was pacing in the patio outside, wrapped in an oversize wool coat, a small radio glued to his ear, tuned to an all-news French channel. With time his mind wandered, and the anchor’s chattering became mere background noise. But suddenly the words Galeries Lafayette popped out. He paused and listened, his mind translating each French word into Arabic: Victim. Dressing room. Algerian or Moroccan. Age fifteen to twenty. Cash. No papers. Shot twice. Police investigating.

  Amidst the shock and pain, Abu Yusef saw Bashir through the window, slouched on the sofa, his legs crossed, his mouth slightly open. A terrible realization came to Abu Yusef. He ran to the pool house to alert the men, but stopped halfway around the water. What would he tell the men? Bashir killed my pretty boyfriend! They would laugh-or worse. They looked up to Bashir, trusted him, and obeyed his orders. In a conflict between them, who would the men choose?

  He changed direction and crossed a patch of grass to a storage shed. Inside, leaning against the wall, was the long skewer they had used to roast the lamb. The cook had cleaned the skewer, and it shone in the dark, its sharp point near the pitched ceiling. Abu Yusef grabbed it and returned to the patio. Through the window he saw Bashir in the same position, fast asleep.

  It took all of Abu Yusef’s self-control not to stab him through. He gripped the metal rod and aimed it at Bashir’s thick throat, just under the chin, and pricked the skin.

  The snoring ceased, and Bashir’s eyes opened. He didn’t move. Even his calm expression remained unchanged despite the sight of the long skewer, which had easily pierced a whole lamb from rectum to jaw.

  “Say your prayers,” Abu Yusef said.

  Very slowly, Bashir raised his hand. “I swear. I didn’t kill Latif.”

  “Then how do you know he’s dead?” Abu Yusef laughed bitterly. “How?”

  Avoiding sudden moves, Bashir’s forefinger pointed at the steel rod. “What else…could come between us?”

  “ You killed him!”

  “ Must be…the Israelis.”

  “Impossible!” Abu Yusef pressed a little harder, and a trickle of blood ran down the side of Bashir’s throat. “You did it! Murderer!”

  With blinding quickness, Bashir’s hand flew at the skewer and flipped it sideways, its point trailing blood. At the same time, Bashir’s leg bent sideways, his knee pounding Abu Yusef’s thigh. The pain was sharp and debilitating, his leg muscles drained of sustenance. And while Abu Yusef collapsed, Bashir jumped to his feet, the skewer in motion, spinning like a parade stick.

  Abu Yusef found himself flat on the carpet, the red point of the skewer in his ear.

  “How dare you,” Bashir groaned, panting hard, “doubt my loyalty?”

  Abu Yusef felt a drop of Bashir’s blood leave the point of the skewer and fill his ear. He tried to move and realized that Bashir’s foot was pinning him down. But the fact that he was still alive proved Bashir’s innocence. “Okay. I believe you.”

  Bashir dumped the rod on the carpet. “I serve under you to fight the Zionists, not to chauffer your bottom boy on shopping trips. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “How did the Israelis find Latif? How did they know where, when?”

  “They must have followed us. It’s the only possibility.” Bashir pressed his hand to the bleeding wound under his chin. “I failed to notice them, but they are clever.”

  “I will avenge him!” Abu Yusef stood, choked with hate. “And Al-Mazir!”

  *

  Thursday, October 19, 1995

  According to the TV newscast, police had been unable to identify the murder victim at the Galeries Lafayette. The large amount of cash found on the youth suggested he was involved in narcotics or prostitution activities, both controlled by Arab immigrants. The camera showed a gurney roll out of the store with a zipped-up body bag, followed by footage from recent police crackdowns on criminal gangs in Paris.

  “ If you wait long enough,” Elie said, “these Arabs end up killing each other.”

  “ A convenient assumption.” Bathsheba stared at him. “It wasn’t one of your hit men, was it?”

  “ Don’t be ridiculous,” Gideon said. “Abu Yusef got bored with the boy and had him killed.”

  Elie opened a drawer in the desk and took out a large folder. He searched through a pile of newspaper clippings and dug out a one-page article from the New York Times. It was less than a year old.

  Bathsheba came behind Gideon and rested her chin on his shoulder.

  He finished reading and looked at Elie. “So?

  “Summarize it, will you?”

  “It’s about Prince Abusalim az-Zubayr, son of Sheik Da’ood Ibn Hisham az-Zubayr. Their company, Transport International al-Saud Inc., holds a virtual monopoly on food and machinery purchases for the kingdom. That’s billions of dollars.” Gideon’s eyes went quickly through the lines. “The prince is an Oxford graduate, lives in a suite at the Hilton Hotel in Paris, many sisters, one half-brother, Salman.”

  “How exotic,” Bathsheba said. “And why do we care about this prince?”

  “Go on,” Elie said.

  “Their oasis north of Riyadh is home to the extended family, including Prince Abusalim’s wives and children. The old sheik owns everything.” Gideon’s scanned the rest of the article. “The interviewer asked the prince what he thought about the Mideast peace process. Answer: Oslo is a sham, because Palestine is part of the land of Islam, and the Jews are usurpers. Question: What about Arafat? Answer: A lea
der must be a true believer, someone willing to fight a jihad for Jerusalem.”

  “That’s odd,” Bathsheba said. “I thought the Saudis support the Oslo peace process.”

  “They do,” Elie said, “but Prince Abusalim dreams of becoming Kharass El-Sharif, keeper of Haram el-Sharif.” He lit another cigarette, holding it between a thumb and yellow forefinger. “That’s why we targeted him. Now he’s collecting bribes from vendors to finance the Palestinian jihad. Remember the tip about the French consulate in Damascus arranging a passport for Al-Mazir?”

  “ You have someone watching the prince’s bank account?” Bathsheba suddenly seemed interested. “Talk about holding someone by the balls!”

  “ Follow the money,” Elie said, “and you’ll find your enemy.”

  “ This prince,” Gideon said, “is a bigger threat to Israel than Abu Yusef. He can bankroll a hundred more terrorist groups.”

  “ Correct.” Elie pulled a sheet of paper from the file. “This is a list of bribes the prince has collected. Use the fax machine at the central post office to send it to this number.”

  Gideon looked at the number scribbled on the sheet. “What country has prefix 966?”

  “Saudi Arabia,” Elie said. “A country where thieves get their right hand chopped off without anesthetics.”

  *

  Lemmy wiped the mist off the bathroom mirror and leaned closer. He kept his sideburns to a minimum, always in a straight line with the upper part of his ear. He had once let his sideburns grow longer, but it reminded him of the payos he had worn so many years ago. Elie had trained him well. Think of yourself as Wilhelm Horch. Forget Jerusalem Gerster. His memories died with him. Gone.

  But despite his complete dedication to the mission, his mind was not immune to the past. Over the years, a familiar tune would trigger a memory of dancing with the righteous men of Neturay Karta, a passing scent from a restaurant would whet his appetite for one of his mother’s dishes, or a familiar face on the street would make his heart skip a beat-like the target in Paris yesterday, reminiscent of Benjamin’s smile.

  During the long drive in the Porsche, and through the short night beside Paula, the face from the Galeries Lafayette had pestered him like a nagging fly.