“I wanted to be where the action is,” Raful replied. “The biggest game in town has moved here: You know it, I know it.”
Avshalom nodded slowly, his whole torso moving, not just his head. “And yet,” he said, “I think that is only half the truth.”
By looking a fraction to one side Raful could glimpse the Western Wall out of his window. It shimmered in that very special kind of debilitating heat that only September Saturday afternoons seemed to generate. Sweat soaked his open-necked shirt. He felt tired, a little ill maybe, but there was nothing to go home to and here, in the Mossad’s headquarters, he could at least derive a crumb of comfort from the physical proximity of stenographers, communications staff, duty officers. He was stuck in this temple of truth, listening to his old friend speculate about half-truths, and for a moment Raful wanted to die because he couldn’t think of a single thing worth living for.
Then Avshalom picked up his briefcase, put it on the desk, and opened it in such a way that Raful couldn’t see its contents.
“I think,” Avshalom murmured from behind the lid of the briefcase, “that you are telling me only half the truth, and maybe this is the other half.”
He handed over a buff envelope, sealed in three places with blobs of wax connected by a thread. A few seconds of silence intervened, void moments when the old city and everything in it ceased to exist. Then slowly, very slowly, so as not to disturb the flicker of hope that had sparked inside his guts, Raful leaned forward to take it.
On the front someone had written the single word
goel.
This Hebrew word meant “the avenger of the blood,” one who, according to ancient Jewish custom, had the right of taking vengeance on the murderer of a kinsman, before retreating to the city of refuge appointed for his safety. Raful saw the word and trembled.
“What is this?” he asked softly, knowing already.
“What you asked me for. I am sorry things took so long. Coordinating classified material is a job fit for the devil.”
In the week after Sara’s funeral, Raful had asked Avshalom to do what he, Raful, had not the power to do: he had asked him,
begged
would be a more honest word, to use his friendships with the politicians, to play the Haganah card, as he’d called it, and demolish all interdepartmental barriers in the attempt to find Sara Sharett’s killers.
This was not a pointless request. The Mossad had its own files on terrorism, of course, but there were other intelligence records its officers could never hope to see: those held by Aman, by Reshud, by Shin Bet, and Shabak, murky organizations one and all. Avshalom Gazit, scourge of the British occupying force, war hero: he could see everything, and if “they” tried to tell him that certain of those records did not exist, he would also be able to see that they were lying.
“Show me the room, Raful. The shrine.”
Sharett’s hands shook. Instead of breaking the thread, tearing off the wax seals, they laid the
goel
envelope on the desk and clasped themselves together as if for mutual comfort.
“Shrine?”
But Avshalom rose, towering over Raful until the other man actually felt himself to be in shadow. He, too, stood up. He tucked the envelope under his arm. The fingers of his right hand traced their way down a chain leading from his waistband into his trouser pocket, and there they sought keys. He led the way out of his office and set off down the north corridor. At the far end was a door with a number on it. When he inserted a key and opened it, the hinges creaked. Evidently this place was not often used, for the two men left traces in the dust on the floor as they entered.
Raful watched his friend’s face, seeking a reaction. Any reaction would have done: reproof, contempt, sorrow, pity. But nothing scratched Avshalom’s slatelike visage. He looked around slowly, like the good intelligence officer he was, taking in the whitewashed walls, the desk and table, the man-high safe.
There was scarcely room for both of them in this cupboard, with its single tiny window. Avshalom approached the table, perhaps noting how neatly arranged were the teddy bear, the brush-and-comb set, school yearbook, and graduation certificate. And the photograph.
Neither man spoke for perhaps five minutes. It sounds so little; when we want to indicate a brief, barely noticeable interval of time we say, “Oh, five minutes,” but three hundred seconds from now can be a long, long time.
“Some people believe … “ Avshalom had picked up the photo of Sara, taken on her graduation day, and was examining it. Now he turned to face Raful, as if he too needed to record a reaction, any reaction. “Some people believe that you keep a woman in here, Raful.” His attempt at good-humored laughter was a dreadful failure. “Some say, We need the office space, the Director has no right to keep it locked up, him having the only key.”
“Some say this is where I make my nightly broadcasts to Baghdad and Damascus.”
“But we checked. And you don’t.”
It hit Raful to know they had actually checked. Hit and hurt him. Such an unprofessional reaction. But then, preserving this room in the heart of the Mossad’s nerve center was in itself so unprofessional that perhaps the implications it carried for others had passed him by.
“Why not keep it all at home, Raful?”
Because he had tried that, and it hurt too much to have her paraphernalia around him while he ate, when he slept or tried to sleep, and he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. Perhaps Avshalom guessed at least part of this answer from Raful’s haggard expression, for he said, “You can’t go on living it forever. There must come a time …”
“Never.”
“A time for letting go, Raful. Not for forgiveness, but—”
“She was blown apart, Avshalom.” Raful swallowed. He could feel moisture on his own cheeks and he hated himself for that weakness, but the other man’s austerity, his coldness, somehow drove him on. “Nothing left. Nothing you could identify.” His voice rose to a wail, fell silent. He tried again. “She was twenty-two, she was lovely.” He took the photograph from Avshalom and stared at it, shaking his head from side to side, as if by doing that he could somehow stem the tears that by now were flooding down his cheeks. “And they drove metal splinters through her face, her stomach, her legs…. ” He raised his eyes to Avshalom, a child pleading to be let off the rest. “They butchered her. She went to a party, a friend’s engagement party, and they cut her up. She’d had no life to speak of. It was all starting for her. Avshalom, Avshalom …
what if they’d done it to your Yigal?”
Avshalom Gazit turned away, saying nothing for a while. At last he expelled a heavy sigh and said, “Open the envelope. Open it.”
Sharett sat down at the small school desk. He had to wipe his eyes several times. At last he broke the red seals.
The envelope contained some fifty sheets of paper, typewritten, single-spaced. He skimmed through, finding the report to be in two parts. The envelope also contained some black-and-white photographs, but these he put aside, knowing instinctively that by doing this he was leaving the best for later.
He began to read. The first and longest section detailed the measures taken to establish the identity of the terrorists who had killed his daughter. With some of this material he was already familiar, some was new to him; some enraged him because he realized it must have been known to others, supposedly on the same side, for a long time, yet they had never shared it with him or recognized his need to know.
At an indeterminate point, while the shadows of afternoon softened and dissolved into one another, bringing down the short dusk, Avshalom Gazit left. Raful did not notice.
Only when he had finished reading the first section of the report did he turn to the photographs. Each was identified at the bottom by means of an adhesive-backed color-coded label. He spent longest on a full-face shot of a woman, and by the time the last of the light had gone, Leila Hanif’s features were impressed on his brain as clearly, as indelibly, as his own daughter’s.
Raful went to switch on the single light bulb that dangled from the ceiling by a few inches of flex before turning up the second section of the report.
Someone—the report did not state who, but Raful knew it must have been Avshalom Gazit—was proposing that a Wrath of God team be sent to kill Leila Hanif. The reason he knew that this proposal must have originated with Gazit was that normally Director Sharett would have had to be informed about any Wrath of God activities, but he had learned nothing of this and only Gazit could have kept it from him. Why would he do that? His way of neutralizing the poison that was eating its way through Sharett’s soul like the acid that ate through his stomach wall? Gazit had guessed that Raful would have insisted on accompanying the Wrath of God; guessed rightly, too. Raful would have died for very shame if anyone else had succeeded in killing Leila Hanif.
Gazit’s proposal had been rejected, for unspecified “operational” reasons. Strange, Raful thought, how in his mind this old friend had suddenly become Gazit. No longer Avshalom. Gazit.
He would get that rejection overturned. He would.
There were more photographs. A husband, Colin. And a son, Robbie. Raful sat in the pale yellow light for a long time while he committed to memory the features of the other two members of the Raleigh family, now all legitimate targets for him and the awesome forces at his command.
“What are you doing here?” Gazit had asked. At last Raful knew.
“ASI bugs and pitch index?”
“Checked.”
Captain Simon Thorneycroft made a tick on his checklist.
“Clock, engine, and TLA bugs?” “Checked.”
Thorneycroft lifted the internal phone and dialed Alex Perkins. “All set,” he said. “You?”
“Everyone’s boarded, Captain. Ready for safety demonstration.”
Thorneycroft nodded to his second officer. “Start clearance.”
The copilot reached for the radio. “London Ground, November Quebec zero-three-three on stand Juliet Fourteen, for start-up?”
The hiss changed. Then—"November Quebec zero-three-three, clear to start. Call on one-two-one decimal nine for push-back.”
At first Halib wasn’t sure if the plane’s rudder had really moved or if it was his imagination. He jammed the sight rings of his binoculars against his eyes until they smarted. A few seconds later, there could be no doubt: NQ 033 was heading for the taxiway.
He fetched the phone, placing it on a table in front of the window, and began to dial while keeping the glasses to his eyes, not looking at the digits, not needing to.
There were thirty more checks to perform during taxi. Then the aircraft held on the threshold of the runway, awaiting its turn for the sky. So early in the morning, traffic was light, and before long the passengers heard a murmur over the speakers: “Cabin crew take your seats for takeoff.”
In the cockpit, Thorneycroft raised an eyebrow at his second officer, who nodded.
“Right, gentlemen, let’s go to Bahrain. Three, two, one,
now.”
He pushed the throttles forward.
“Twenty knots … fifty knots … eighty knots … airspeed building.”
The plane already felt lighter in Thorneycroft’s hands; he could sense its skittish desire to be airborne.
“One hundred knots.”
“Power checked.”
“V-one … rotate.”
As Thorneycroft used his palms to nudge the stick back, a frisky gust of wind celebrated the aircraft’s return home to where it belonged and he compensated gently; then they were up.
When Halib was connected to Susannah Duclerc’s suite he waited to hear his sister’s voice before he spoke.
“This is just to let you know,” he said, sounding almost brusque, “that your cargo got away safely.”
NQ 033 was still a speck in his binoculars. While he waited for her to reply, his hand never trembled, keeping the plane in the dead center of his focal image. “Thank you.”
He replaced the receiver with a slight frown, not even sure if he had really heard those whispered words. Halib justly prided himself on his command of English nuance: it occurred to him that Leila’s voice had sounded not so much distant as altogether absent.
The light had changed now. It was stronger, even less kind than before. Leila sat in front of the mirror, with this new, hostile light coming from her left. She looked strangely pallid. The eyes reflected in the glass were never quite still, not even when she stared directly into them. She could not control the flickering of her own eyes, and that failure, petty in itself, disturbed her.
She did not know how many hours had passed since Halib’s last call, informing her that NQ 033 was airborne. She had eaten nothing today, nor was she hungry. The coffeepot had been replenished twice, that she did know, because the waiter’s arrival necessitated action on her part, and she remembered action, always.
Her right foot had gone to sleep. She wriggled the toes, wincing slightly as life flowed back into them. Soon it would be time to go. Soon she would look at her watch, but not yet. Her inner self would tell her, to the minute, when to consult her watch, knowing in advance what the watch would say. She had been programmed, as a child, by reference to a particular moment, and ever since then she had revolved around that moment, gyroscopically, without fault or flaw. So many years, months, days, hours, since
then.
Leila stared into the mirror but did not see herself. She saw a man without a face, just a black oval above the shoulders where a face would normally be. This was her old friend. Lover, almost. She could not live without this man. He gave her existence whatever meaning it had managed to retain since
then.
The glorious old house called Kharif in the hills overlooking Beirut. For some reason she had a memory of blue sea and white waves that day, she did not know why: the angle was wrong for a view of the beach; from the upstairs rooms you could only see the Mediterranean far out, beyond the harbor, where sunlight made it almost colorless. But azure sea and white-streaked waves were part of the memory. Part of
then.