- -
- 100%
- +
The bus inched forward in the line, surrounded by barbed wire and graffiti-covered concrete, steel reinforcement rods rusting away in long brown streaks. The stink of leaded gasoline fumes filled the air around him, came in through his open window and bit at his throat.
Before they reached the checkpoint, armed Palestinian Authority security men came on to the bus. One of them took the passenger list from the driver and read through it. Another, younger, officer checked through the documents that passengers had; passports, work permits, sometimes only letters from a possible employer and an identity card.
The man with the passenger list made a call on his cell phone. The bored young man with an AK on his back flipped through Rashid’s Israeli passport.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“Acco.”
“Purpose of your visit?” he asked, looking carefully at Rashid’s travel documents.
Rashid hadn’t seen him ask anyone else these questions, and he started to tremble again. “I’m—I’m going to see a—girl.”
The man laughed. He was only a little older than Rashid.
Rashid relaxed a little, and then the man with the passenger list pointed at him. “Rashid Halaby?” he said.
The younger guard nodded, held up Rashid’s passport.
“Take him.”
Tel Aviv
Dressed and waiting for his wife, Alan Craik was thinking not of her but of how thoroughly their world had changed since September eleventh. He was not thinking in sequence, not being rational or logical, rather letting his mind leapfrog from idea to idea; in fact, there was no logic, only the sequence of time itself, certainly no meaning. September eleventh obsessed his world, but he was oddly not quite of it: he had been on an island in the Gulf of Oman on September eleventh, miles from a television set, and he had not seen those images as they had burned their way into the world’s consciousness. He saw them later, to be sure; he had been shocked, saddened, angered, but he had missed the raw outrage—and the fear—that had gripped so many people. The difference was that he had not seen the horror live on television:
The island was rocky scrub and sand. There were goats, lots of them, many apparently wild. People walked into and out of this landscape as if passing from another reality into his and then out again. The sky came down like gray, hot metal and the sea, a smell wherever he went, was rarely visible. He was doing the red tape on the setting-up of a Navy sonar station, a job that could have been done and done better by a lieutenant with some sonar experience, but he was out of favor at Fifth Fleet, out of favor with the new flag and the new flag captain. The flag captain had said that there was no place for him there anymore and they’d expedite a new duty station for him but they didn’t want him as their intel, didn’t want his kind, whatever that meant. But he knew what it meant: a risktaker, a man who thought that out on a limb was where intel was done best.
He was out at the site, watching the goats, the odd Bedouin. Nothing was happening. He was thinking that they didn’t need him there at all. Right at that moment, they didn’t need him anywhere. Then his cell phone rang and the world changed. It was Sully, a CIA security thug who was a bully but the right man to have if people started shooting at you. Sully pushed people around verbally by saying the things that you didn’t say when the dynamics among people were fragile or explosive—sex, politics, religion—and now he said, the very first thing he said, “Al-Qaida just re-elected George Bush to a second term.” Then he had explained that a jetliner had crashed into the World Trade Center and other passenger aircraft were missing and bad shit was going down.
The event had jerked him from the job at Fifth Fleet to one as a Temporary Additional Duty case officer at Central Command, Qatar. He had been twice to Afghanistan since then, three times to Kuwait, once to Pakistan, once to Iran, all in the four months since that remarkably, perhaps fantastically, lucky, successful, outrageous al-Qaida hit. He had gone from vengefulness to resignation, then to a kind of skeptical sadness.
“Penny?” Rose said.
He took her hand. “I was thinking that al-Qaida did things right, and we’re going to do things wrong.”
“Still chewing on it.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to go rushing back to a squadron to throw myself at bin Laden, if that’s what you mean.”
She’d been really hurt, he knew, by bailing out of the astronaut program. The Navy had lost some of its zest for her; he thought that it was that loss that had let her get pregnant again, driven her, maybe, back on her kids and on him. “There’ll be plenty of time to go to a squadron,” he said. “Years.”
“Another war, you think?”
“Oh, yeah. Lots of them.” He stood up, kissed her. “Bin Laden has arranged our futures for us.”
“We make our own futures.” She believed in self-determination.
“I thought so until this happened, but now—” He shook his head. “I keep wanting to look up to see who’s jerking my strings.” He straightened his clothes, pulling on himself as if he were rearranging his body, and they went to the elevator. He told her, in a different, heavier voice, that he was going to run Dukas’s errand while she shopped for presents for their kids. “I’m going there now and I should be done by two, and we’ll have a late lunch and then I’ll mosey over to the embassy and arrange to have them send the stuff to Mike.”
“I want to see a movie. Let’s go to a movie.”
“In Hebrew? Anyway, I’ve seen Harry Potter as much as I can stand.”
“It might be more interesting in Hebrew.”
On the street, he warned her for the third or maybe the fifth time of what to look for to avoid car bombs; he told her to duck if anybody started shooting, because half the crowd in any given spot would be armed; he told her to be careful of the baby. She told him he was a fuss-budget and she loved him and she’d see him at two o’clock.
He was back to thinking about September eleventh. “Everybody’s scared here,” he said. “Scared people scare me.”
Naples
Mike Dukas flicked a paper across his desk to Dick Triffler. “What the hell is an Office of Information Analysis?”
Triffler studied the paper. “It’s a secret office in DoD to do an end run around the intel agencies.”
“What the hell?”
“Folks who don’t like it call it the Office of Intellectual Paralysis. Folks who do like it think it’s the latest thing in what they call ‘intelligence reform,’ which means doing the Alley Oop around worn-out old shitkickers like the CIA, the FBI, and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. We are, and I think I quote, ‘tired, old, liberal, and nitpicking.’ It’s do-it-yourself intel.”
“How come you know all that and I don’t?”
“I read The New Yorker.”
“Some secret.”
Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”
“I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”
Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”
“No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”
“I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”
“Sounds right.”
“Check it out, will you?”
Triffler sighed. “If I say ‘Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”
“No time.”
Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.
“Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”
“My word for it would be ‘elegant.’”
“Your wife is so lucky.”
“Tell her that.”
“Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”
“There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”
“This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”
“You’d win my undying gratitude.”
“That your best offer?”
“At this distance, I’m afraid so.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.
“What’re you offering, chickie?”
“Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”
He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”
She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.
“You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”
“Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”
The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta lick to pry loose a list of folks in some shithouse called the Office of Information Analysis?” he said.
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv is a city of beautiful women and ugly architecture; the first make up for the second. Craik found it a pleasure to walk.
The police station on Dizengoff Street was on a par with the city’s other buildings, but at least it looked as if being a cop was a good thing—clean, solid, windowless. The entrance didn’t invite you in but announced that going in, with the right credentials, would be easier than getting out with the wrong ones.
He showed his passport and his part-timer’s NCIS badge. “Commander Craik, US Navy. About the death of Qatib, Salem.”
The policewoman at the inquiries desk spoke better Hebrew than she did English, but she wrote some things down and got on a telephone. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes detective was looking Alan over and probably realizing that he wasn’t armed—Alan, like most of the men in Tel Aviv, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks—while Alan was looking him over and deciding that the extra tuck on the right side of his shirt covered an in-the-waistband holster, and his slightly cocked left foot might suggest an ankle gun.
People went by as if they were heading for a somber event, heads down, moving fast. The space was big, harshly echoing, lighted with banks of fluorescents overhead; the noise of footsteps was like some sort of clattering engine. Move, move, the noise, the atmosphere seemed to say; get in and get out, don’t linger, we’re serious here.
“Commander Alan Craik?”
The man was blond, chunky, purposely likable. He had a Browning nine-millimeter in a very visible shoulder holster and he smiled as if he really was glad to see Alan. Maybe he was simply glad to see anybody who would allow him to strike an item off his to-do list. “Detective Sergeant Berudh.”
They shook hands. Berudh led him toward a bank of elevators, one hand behind Alan’s left arm; he was chattering about the building—how big it was, how many different offices it housed, how many crimes they covered a day. “You’re US Navy,” he said abruptly. “Not from a ship, I think.”
“No, not from a ship.” Habit kept him from saying where he was stationed just then. Which was absurd, of course, because the Israelis would already know. And they were allies. More or less.
Berudh was silent in the elevator, surrounded as they were by worried-looking people who were certainly not police. The elevator smelled of nervousness, Alan thought. Then two young women got on, smiling, bouncy, and chattered as the elevator rose. They worked there and seemed to say, “What is there to be nervous about?”
“Only the police are at home in a police station,” he said when they got off.
“And why not? Everybody’s guilty about something.” Berudh led the way down a corridor. “Most of them are here for permits, licenses, getting papers stamped, but they feel guilty. Actually, it makes the job easier.” He held a door open. “You’re NCIS?”
Alan explained that he had a badge but it was left over from earlier duty. “The special agent in charge of NCIS, Naples, asked me to do this for him.”
“Scut work,” Berudh said and gave him the smile. Berudh spoke American English with a slight accent, clearly knew American slang. “We work with NCIS when there are ships in Haifa, stuff like that. Sailors come down here, get in the usual trouble sailors do, we have to arrest them, blah-blah-blah. But we’re all friends.”
He was leading Alan through a room that had half a dozen desks in it, fluorescent lights overhead, a computer on each desk and a man or woman working at each one. More guns were in evidence here, some hung in their holsters on chairbacks.
“Okay.” Berudh sat behind the only empty desk, pulled a metal chair over for Alan. He offered coffee or tea or soda, told a quick joke, surprised Alan by asking to see his ID. “I know you ID’d yourself at the door and at reception, but it’s a rule. Death is serious business, isn’t it?” He looked over the passport and the badge, made some notes, and sat back. “Okay.”
He had a thin pile of photocopies and computer printouts. He began to hand them across the desk, naming each one as he did so—“Initial contact sheet—log sheet—physician’s report—death certificate—telephone log, that’s only to show when we notified your embassy—” The pages were clean, all typed, neat, efficient, but in a language Alan couldn’t read. Berudh explained that Qatib, Salem, had begun his police connection as an unidentified corpse in Jaffa, another of Tel Aviv’s sub-districts, then been logged in as a homicide, then identified from missing-person calls placed by his family.
Alan could have taken the papers then and left, but a perverse sense of duty made him ask questions he wasn’t at all interested in. “How come if he was found in Jaffa, you’re handling it here?”
“Question of internal politics.” Berudh made a face. “Yarkov District claims control over all cases of wrongful death. Not that we handle them all. Our homicide people are very territorial.”
“How long had he been missing?”
“Unh—” Berudh half-stood and leaned over to look at Alan’s pages. “You’ve got a page from our missing-persons log—it’s small type, very dense—” Alan held up a page; Berudh squinted at it and said, “I think the first call came in about eleven p.m.” Berudh rattled through a translation of the missing-persons page: a woman’s voice had made the first call, identified herself as a girlfriend; the victim hadn’t turned up for dinner at his cousin’s. They looked at the physician’s report. The man had been dead an estimated seven to twelve hours when the doctor had examined him.
“But no autopsy,” Alan said.
“No, no, no. Arabs are against that.”
“Can I see the body?” He hoped the answer was no.
“We released him to the family pretty much as soon as the doc was through with him. Off to the West Bank.” Berudh raised his hands. “Coffin was closed.”
Something pinged in Alan’s brain but didn’t quite connect, and he said lamely, stalling until the connection was made, “You don’t have a suspect.”
“At this point, no. Mugging? Girlfriend? Palestinian infighting?” He shrugged. “This guy was in your Navy, but a Palestinian can be into anything. Hamas, Fatah—he could have had a suicide belt stashed someplace, chickened out, got punished. They’re all fanatics.”
Alan signed a paper that said that he had in fact received all the stuff in his hand, and Berudh, smiling again, gave him a dark blue plastic folder with something in Hebrew on it and TLVPD in English in white letters. “It’ll keep them neat; they blow in the wind, you know; we always have a breeze, it’s the sea—that’s Tel Aviv, my friend, the Fort Lauderdale of the eastern Med—” He was seeing Alan to the elevator, explaining twice how to get out of the building, assuring him that if there was anything, anything he could do—and was gone.
In the vast lobby, assaulted again by the clatter of echoes, Alan crossed among the worried people heading for the elevators and looked with relish at the thin slice of the outdoors that showed through the guarded entrance. Guilt. Even when you weren’t guilty of anything, you felt it. He thought of September eleventh: Yes, it’s guilt, as if I could have stopped it. Which was nonsense.
It was at that point that his brain made the connection he’d missed earlier. According to the two-page file Dukas had faxed him—Qatib’s short personnel record and an ID sheet—he had had family in the States. But the body, Berudh had said, had been sent to the West Bank. Maybe the family had moved back? Or the parents had divorced and one had come back? Or—?
Instead of leaving the police building, ignoring Dukas’s plea not to be an intel officer, he went to the information desk and said to the same young woman, “I’d like to talk to somebody in Homicide.” Why hadn’t he asked to see Berudh again? he wondered. Because you check one source against another. He pointed at the signature on the first page in the blue folder Berudh had given him. “This person,” he said, figuring that one way in was as good as another.
3
Gaza City, Palestinian Authority
He wasn’t sure where he was—somewhere in the territories. The interrogation room smelled of mold. It was underground, the white paint on the walls peeled away from the concrete in long strips, exposing the rough surface beneath. It was too bright, lit by a pair of hot halogen lights, so that cockroaches threw sharp shadows on the floor where they scuttled.
Rashid had been waiting there for three hours. He had surprised himself by falling asleep. He had woken up to find that the persistent itching on his leg was an insect that had crawled up his jeans. He panicked, flailed around the room getting the unclean thing out of his clothes.
Then he sat, his arms crossed on his chest, and waited.
He heard steps in the hall, conversations, snatches of laughter, once, a startled scream.
More steps in the hall, sharper, and the click of a woman’s heels. His door opened.
There was a man and a woman. The man was middleaged, thin, smoking. The woman was younger, but not by much, wore heels and a short skirt.
Men with guns brought two chairs.
“I am Colonel Mahmoud Hamal and this is Zahirah,” the man said. “You are Rashid George Halaby?”
Rashid nodded.
“You know who I am?”
Rashid shook his head.
“Perhaps you have heard me called the Tax Collector. Hmm? I am responsible for the security of our Palestinian Authority in regard to antiquities. You work for Hamas?”
The question pierced through Rashid’s other fears; something to be dreaded, something for which he had not prepared an answer. So he said nothing, tried to keep his eyes down. He had heard of the Tax Collector. Salem had mentioned him—feared him, even.
“How long have you been with Hamas?” Colonel Hamal was looking at a manila folder.
Rashid looked at him with lowered eyes. The colonel was wearing a suit, had a silk tie, and a heavy gold ring on his finger. Rashid blinked to keep tears off his face.
The colonel waved the folder at him. “You are Rashid George Halaby. You live in Haifa. You run errands for Hamas. You had two brothers killed in the Intifada by Jewish soldiers. Your father died in Jordan in a riot. Your mother teaches at a Muslim school. Why not just say these things?”
Unbidden, Rashid’s eyes rose and met the colonel’s. The man smiled.
“You have an Israeli passport. As far as I can tell, you have never been arrested in Israel. Are you a Muslim?”
Rashid nodded.
“How do you come to have an Israeli passport?” the woman asked. Her voice was warm, her Arabic slightly accented.
“We live in Acco. Not Haifa.” Rashid spoke softly, as if he was afraid he might be overheard. They must know these things. Haifa was an Israeli town. Acco had a big Palestinian population, one of the biggest in Israel. “I’m a Palestinian.”
The man waved his hand, his attention still on the documents. “Acco, then. Either way, you are not from Gaza or the West Bank. You have an Israeli passport.” Hamal threw it on the table in front of the boy. “Why didn’t you proclaim it? I have no jurisdiction over you.”
Rashid couldn’t think of a reply. He couldn’t think at all. All answers were going to lead to the same place—Hamas, Salem, Hamas, Salem. Had he killed the man with the hammer? Did they know? He shrugged, the motion stiff. Rashid rubbed the back of his hand over his face, rubbed his lips. The arresting officers had not been gentle.
“What were you doing here?” Hamal paused for effect. “In Gaza?”
“Working. With a friend.” Rashid thought that sounded harmless, but both the man and the woman smiled.
“What were you working on?”
Rashid’s lips trembled.
“How long have you been with Hamas?” Hamal asked again.
“Since my brothers died.” Rashid answered savagely.
Hamal nodded. He smoked for over a minute. “You were working with a friend. Digging, perhaps?”
Rashid didn’t know what to say, because these people seemed to know so much. And he had no idea what they wanted. But after too long a hesitation, he said, “Yes,” softly.
The woman leaned forward across the table. “Is your friend Salem Qatib, Rashid?”
Rashid gave himself away with his reaction, and read it on them. But the mention of the name caused much of the fear to drop away. They were in it now. He raised his eyes, met hers. She was attractive; her eyes were big and friendly. She wore scent.
“Yes,” he said.
“How well do you know Salem Qatib?” Colonel Hamal asked.
Rashid squirmed. “We are friends.”
Hamal rustled his papers and glanced at his watch.
“He—he played with my oldest brother—when they were boys,” Rashid said.
Hamal didn’t look up from the dossier in front of him.
“Then—then he went away to—America,” Rashid said. “When he—Salem—came back, he came to visit my mother.”
The woman nodded her understanding.
Rashid went on, “He wanted to offer my brother a job, but Ali—was dead. So he took me instead.”
“Tell me about that job.” The woman leaned forward, and her scent covered the smell of mold and made the room a better place. It was not a smell of sex, but of flowers.
“We dug. For old things, antiquities.” Rashid knew he was committed now, had said too much, but their expressions didn’t change and he had nothing to lose. They were interested in Salem. So was he. “Salem would identify a site, and we would dig by hand. If there were things, then other men would come, but we would do the fine work.” Rashid tried to express the fine work by brushing the table with his fingers. “With a toothbrush? You know? And sifting. The other men would never sift, they wanted to use a backhoe for everything.”
“And Hamas told you to take the job.” Hamal was leaning forward too, his cigarette smoke cutting through the woman’s perfume. She waved at the smoke, but her eyes stayed with Rashid.
Rashid wrapped himself in his arms again and sat quietly. Because it was true, and because it was a betrayal of Salem before he even knew Salem.