Damascus Gate (44 page)

"Are you my folks?" he asked. "You have something for me?"

It developed that they had, and it was Lenny's box. Leaving his motor running, the soldier climbed down from the cab. He had a big smile for Sonia. Perhaps for that reason she helped him take the box out of the back seat. It was very heavy.

"Where you from, dear?" the soldier asked. "You ain't from here, are you? You ain't an Ethiopian girl?"

"American," Sonia said, handing over the carton.

"No fooling? How about that?"

"How about you?" she asked him.

"I'm Fijian. Long way from home."

At the edge of the road, Linda was fiddling with the camera. For all Sonia knew, she was filming them.

"What do you think of that woman taking your picture there?" Sonia asked the Fijian.

"Reckon it's all right. She's done it before. Hey, I knew you was from Canada or the U.S. Where you live?"

"I live in J-town," she said.

"Come down to Tel Aviv tomorrow. Come to party. We've got Fijian blokes. Canadians. All kinds."

His name, it turned out, was John Lautoka, a Micronesian rather than an Indo-Fijian, and he was quite handsome.

The guard in the adjoining tower now addressed them through his bullhorn. He seemed to be growing impatient.

"I think he's telling us to fuck off," Sonia said.

"Right," said Lenny, "let's do it."

From the edges of Nuseirat they could hear the amplified voices of muezzins.

"I don't want to be boring," she said, "but what was in the box?"

"Oh," Linda said airily, "stuff for Ernest. Tapes, videos. Paper."

Beyond Argentina camp's wire, a Laredo with the white letters
UN
taped to its sides whizzed past them and made a U-turn to the gate. It was the Rose and Nuala. The Rose climbed out; she still had the
STUDY ARSE ME
bumper sticker on her jeep but her attire was more modest. Nuala got out the other side.

Nuala and the Rose looked at Linda briefly. They had all seen each other around.

"I'm Lenny," said Lenny.

"What'd you want to come to Argentina camp for, Linda?" The Rose phrased her question in the sort of friendly, cheerful and helpful Canadian manner that brought an accusatory pall over the entire exchange.

"Well. I work for the Israeli Human Rights Coalition," Linda said. "And there are men in that camp who claim to have been beaten. So we made a tape."

"Not in there you didn't." Nuala strolled over to her. "Ernest would never send you in there. Aren't you one of those American Christers?" She turned to Lenny. "Who're you, friend? What do you have to do with Argentina camp?"

It seemed odd, Sonia thought, that Nuala would not know Lenny if he was one of their contacts.

"Who told you to pick up here?" Nuala asked the Fijian driver, John Lautoka, who had been picking his teeth and comparing the Rose's and Nuala's structural dynamics.

"I was told what I was told," the man said.

Three separate covert conversations ensued. While Nuala questioned Lautoka, Sonia took the Rose aside. Lenny and Linda were left looking left and right in the middle of the dirt road, holding their own counsel.

From the watchtower, the soldier who was supposed to be American whistled between his teeth and pointed at his wrist to indicate a contracting supply of time. Lenny waved him off impatiently. The soldier shouted something.

"Do you know what this place is, Sonia?" the Rose asked. "This Argentina camp place? It's where they keep their snitches. No one in there is going to talk to a reporter or a rights worker."

"She filmed these guys," Sonia said. "I thought we were making some kind of preliminary contact. She told me Ernest sent her. And Len had a friend on guard duty."

"Shit too," said the Rose. "That's not likely. I wasn't going to tell you this," she said. "Nuala's running dope into T.V. They get guns in exchange."

"I know," Sonia said. "And I suppose Shabak does too."

"They've been doing it for years," the Rose told her. "Shabak will play one faction off against another, and whoever's considered useful at the moment gets guns and money. But to keep the Americans from finding out, they work through dope dealers like Stanley. The IDF has orders not to interfere."

"I suppose they each think they're getting the best of the deal."

"Everybody knows. Except us. UNRWA. And even we know, if you see what I mean. The Americans probably know too. Shabak was using Hamas the same way. To screw the Muslim Brotherhood. Until it blew up on them."

"Where does Linda come in?" Sonia asked.

"It doesn't make sense. It's all worked out between the Communist faction of the PLO and the Shabak control. Nuala and Rashid handle it from this end. The Israeli Human Rights Coalition would never be involved in something like this."

"Maybe they're dropping the Communists?"

"I don't know, Sonia. It's scary."

Sonia saw black smoke rising over the hovels of Bureij town. Burning rubber.

They heard amplified voices from the mosques, although it was not the hour of prayer. The voices sounded enraged, almost hysterical, aged voices distorted and shrill. From the shabby precincts of Argentina camp, a pathetic wail of fear—the fear of grown young men who had lost their fighting spirit, their strutting vanity, their feigned self-confidence, their self-respect and finally even their adulthood—ascended like a foul prayer over the filth and stink of their quarters. The Israeli soldiers on guard shouted them down in mocking consolation. Everyone turned to watch the smoke.

Nuala was questioning John Lautoka.

"You were supposed to pick up in town," she said. "Who told you to pick up here? Was it Walid?" Walid was the name one of their controls used, though he was an Israeli and not a Palestinian.

"No. An IDF soldier I never saw before. But he used the right codes."

From his watchtower, the sentry whistled again and pointed to the horizon.

"I've got to go," Lenny told Linda. "Will you be all right with them?"

"I'll be all right," Linda said. "But where will you go, Lenny?"

"Kfar Gottlieb. I'll get a ride from the camp in the next army jeep," Lenny said. "I've had enough of these people."

"You should come with us," Linda said. "You'll be seen and you won't be able to work out here again."

Lenny smiled. "There won't be anyone out here except us, remember?"

"Ride with the soldier in the PKF truck," Linda suggested. "He can drop you at the checkpoint outside Nuseirat, and there's always someone going to Kfar Gottlieb from there."

"No," Lenny said, "I don't mind being seen by the Arabs, but I shouldn't be riding with
that
element. It's all right for you. I'll wait here for an IDF vehicle."

"For heaven's sake," Linda said, "don't dawdle. Look at all the smoke."

The fumes were ascending now from every direction, black and unacceptable as Cain's sacrifice.

Nuala opened the gate for John Lautoka and his truck and called for everyone to leave.

"Bloody hell," she said, sniffing the stench of rubber. "Here we go again!"

O
N HIS WAY
home from the burnt ruin of his car, Lucas went to a police station to report its trashing by fire. The Israeli policemen had not exactly hooted and jeered at him, but their manner had not been overly sympathetic either. It had been a hell of a way to start the day, a most uninspiring climax to a night's vigil.

There was a cut-rate car rental office near the police station, so he stopped there and filled out the paperwork for the rental of a Ford Taurus. Rental cars were not always readily available, and since he was likely to need one soon, it was just as well to get the process under way.

Arriving in his apartment, weary and disgusted, he turned on the phone machine and heard Sonia's voice on it. She was going to the Strip. Linda Ericksen had arranged for her to videotape the confessions of Abu Baraka. She had tried to get Ernest to go there with them, but he was out of the country. She was meeting Abu at a place called Argentina camp, near Nuseirat.

He sat on the bed for a minute or two, pondering Sonia's message. Then he tried calling the offices of the Israeli Human Rights Coalition. Ernest was away, as it turned out, but the North American—sounding young woman he spoke with was familiar with Abu Baraka's pastimes. She felt able to assure him that nothing as newsworthy as a statement from Abu Baraka himself was in the offing. Had it been, Linda Ericksen, a foreign volunteer who had more or less withdrawn her minor services from the organization, would not have been detailed to deal with it. He thought about it for a moment more, then decided to pick up his rental car.

Two hours later, he was leaving it at a parking lot on the Israeli side of the Green Line. He crossed into the Strip on his press credentials and hired a
sherut
to take him to Argentina camp. The driver, a young man who spoke a little English, was torn between his insistence that he knew of no such destination as Argentina camp and his determination not to lose Lucas as a fare. Since there was no such place, the driver made it clear to Lucas, it would be expensive to go there.

On the way, he entertained Lucas with fragments of Shakespeare: "To be or not to be ... Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ... Ripeness is all..."

The horizon before them grew progressively more hazy. Then the haze became smoke, and at first it seemed to be part of the eternally burning trash fires that wafted out of the camps' dumps. Eventually, both Lucas and his driver recognized it as rubber smoke, the kind of smoke that signaled flaming barricades. The driver slowed down.

Out of the smoke came a sweating, blackened man; he was hurrying along looking straight ahead, swinging his arms in a military fashion. He looked out of place, to say the least.

The driver turned to Lucas. Lucas, who had been preparing for an argument with him over proceeding further, was surprised to see him smiling unpleasantly.

"A Jew," he said. For a fraction of a second, Lucas thought the man was talking about
him.
Then he realized that the Jew in question was the unlikely pedestrian they had passed. They drove for another few minutes, and to his great relief Lucas saw two white vehicles parked behind a barbed-wire gate off the road. Sonia, Nuala, Linda Ericksen and the Rose were gathered beside them.

"I got your message," he told Sonia.

"Thanks, Chris," she said. "You probably shouldn't have come."

"Forget it," he said. He paid the driver and got out. His driver lost no time in hauling ass the way they had come. The departing taxi added its exhaust fumes to the gathering smoke.

"We're turning back," Nuala told him from the lead car. "We're going the way your driver went. I want to get home to Deir el-Balah."

"I think it's popping that way too," Lucas said. "Maybe we can get there by the coast road. By the way," he asked Nuala, "who was the guy walking along the road? I think he might be in trouble."

Linda Ericksen had been sitting on the passenger side of Sonia's Land Rover with the door open. She got to her feet. "Oh," she said, "Lenny!"

"Who's Lenny?"

"We don't think we know," Sonia said.

"You've got to help him," Linda said.

"If he's not known," Nuala said from the lead car, "he's in trouble."

They decided to leave the Rose's Laredo to the security of Argentina camp and make for Deir el-Balah in Sonia's UN vehicle. Nuala, for her part, was worried about Rashid.

They packed themselves into the Land Rover. Nuala drove, with the Rose and Linda beside her. Sonia and Lucas sat in back.

Nuala was scanning the burning landscape, counting off the towns that seemed to be in flames. Bureij. Maghazi. There was smoke everywhere. They began to hear small-arms fire.

Linda stammeringly told her story about documenting Abu Baraka's crimes for Sonia's benefit.

"They've got to be more careful with their snitches than that," Nuala said to Linda. "I'm sorry, I don't buy it."

"Why would you?" Linda asked her furiously. "You're with the
fedayeen.
You're one of them. You too," she told the Rose. "Lenny's a genuinely concerned individual. He's with the Human Rights Coalition."

"Is he?" Sonia asked Lucas.

"I don't know," Lucas said. "I don't think so."

By the time they had gone as far as Bureij, they had not seen a single Israeli vehicle or soldier. The IDF might have concentrated some forces at the approaches to Argentina camp, but they had clearly pulled out of the concrete slums of Bureij, closing down the highway northward, strengthening their checkpoint and waiting for reinforcements before going in. For the moment, the
shebab
had free rein of the noisome lanes and had even come out on the road.

Some of the youths were running along it, jogging parallel with the Land Rover. Their faces were veiled in their kaffiyehs; each kaffiyeh's color expressed the wearer's political affiliation, Lucas had been told. The Arafat people wore a black check. The Communists, under Nuala's Rashid, naturally favored red. Hamas wore Islamic green. Green was the prevailing color now, here in Bureij.

It was the first time Lucas had ever seen the
shebab
rampant. Some of the boys spun in ecstasy. Some threw their heads back and screamed at the smoky sky.

"
Allahu akbar!
"

They had not quite the friendliness toward UN vehicles Lucas was used to. Some of the men who had unveiled their faces had terrible smiles. Many wept. How shall it be with kingdoms and with kings, Lucas thought. He forgot the rest. He did not roll up the window, in spite of the smoke. He did not avert his gaze from them.

"
Allahu akbar!
"

The wretched of the earth, the avengers of oppression, the beloved of God, blessed be He. Up ahead he could see the IDF checkpoint beyond smoke and wire, and the soldiers retiring toward it from the town, covering their withdrawal squad by squad. Rocks flew, and gas grenades, and he heard the small whiz of bullets, rubber and the other kind.

"
Allahu akbar!
"

And maybe for these army kids, the undertrained reserve soldiers of the IDF, temporarily outnumbered, it was as it had been for the toughs in the Antonia Fortress of the Old City, in the first flush of the Jewish Revolt, when the Zealots came for them in the name of Sabaoth. The same God inspiring the same strokes. Mercy was His middle name—except on certain occasions, during special enthusiasms.