Exile: a novel (49 page)
“You mean like they did when they tried to ship armaments to Arafat on the
Karine A
? Why do I think that nothing I’ve said comes as a complete surprise?”
Stein laughed softly. “I’ll give you this—you’ve done your homework. The problem is that you’re shadowboxing an enemy, or enemies, you can’t see. Suspicion’s one thing; proof ’s another.”
“What if I can give you something that falls midway between suspicion and proof?”
Stein sat back. “I’ll pass on the information you’re offering, Mr. Wolfe. Whoever you’re dealing with has interests of their own. But I will say that our government has interests beyond convicting your client.”
For the first time since coming to Israel, David felt a moment of hope. “I’m glad someone does,” he answered.
A few minutes before ten, David took the elevator to the garage.
The cabdriver—a squat man with a closed-off look and a two-day stubble—was parked near the elevator. When David leaned through the open passenger window and said, “David Wolfe,” the cabbie motioned him inside.
Exiting the garage, the driver checked his side mirrors. For twenty minutes they drove in silence, taking one turn after the other. The sensation was akin to being kidnapped. David asked no questions. He had no idea where he was.
After a last abrupt turn, the cab came to a stop in a neighborhood of shops and restaurants. Pointing up the street, the man said in a thick Russian accent, “It is two blocks. Get out now—I am paid already.”
The day was sunny but cool. Hands in his pockets, David stood on the street for a moment, gripped by the importance and yet the incongruity of the moment—he was a lawyer in a murder case, adrift in another country, behaving like a spy.
The thunderous boom of a large explosion broke off his thoughts. On the street ahead, brakes screeched and cars began honking, their drivers trying to escape; pedestrians scurried past him, away from the direction of the blast. Suddenly David knew exactly what had happened: the explosion had occurred at the Café Keret. He also knew that he should not be anywhere near it.
For another moment, he simply stood there, listening to the wailing sirens of the ambulances and police cars that were already on their way. Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction.
When he reached the hotel room, the first bulletins were coming from CNN. There had been another suicide bombing, the reporter said, at a sidewalk café in Tel Aviv.
W
ithin thirty minutes, David had checked out of his hotel and called Zev Ernheit on his cell phone. Their conversation was terse: David asked to meet at once; Ernheit gave him directions to a place near the town of Qalqilya. As he drove, David checked his rearview mirror; he did not see anyone following him.
When he spotted Ernheit’s car, David understood the reason for their meeting place—a large patch of asphalt off the highway surrounded by open fields, it provided no cover for close surveillance. The nearest structures were a thirty-foot concrete wall, from which extended miles of security fence, winding through open fields and over hills, designed to enclose within its boundaries red-roofed Israeli settlements. The wall and fence lent the stark landscape the air of a war zone.
Ernheit leaned back against the car. Still on edge, David asked, “What
is
this place?”
“We’re at the de facto border between Israel and the West Bank,” Ernheit answered. “Before the intifada, where we’re standing was a thriving outdoor market. Palestinian farmers brought their produce here to sell to Israeli buyers—hotels in Tel Aviv would purchase fruit and vegetables by the crateload. Then it became a place where suicide bombers got explosives from their handlers.
“Now we have a hundred-and-fifty mile security infrastructure: an electronic fence, a ditch, more fence. Where Israelis in their cars or homes are within range of a handgun, the barrier becomes a wall.” Ernheit pointed to the barrier as it snaked along a distant hill. “It’s designed to pick up Jewish settlements and exclude Palestinian villages. But Palestinians who once could go from one village to another in twenty minutes now may have to
travel for five hours. So we started building underground tunnels to facilitate their movement and still allow us to check for bombs and weapons. But commerce between us is dead.”
“This is Alice in Wonderland,” David said. “Fences, walls, ditches, tunnels.”
“It’s real enough to the settlers.” Ernheit turned to him. “The fence excludes outposts like Bar Kochba, where Barak Lev and the Masada movement are centered. That’s another reason why Lev wanted God to strike down Ben-Aron. For them, this barrier dooms their future, and the future of Greater Israel.”
David tried to imagine the desperation such men might feel. “A few hours ago,” he told Ernheit, “there was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. What do you know about it?”
Ernheit showed no surprise. “Enough. Besides the bomber, there was only one death, that of an Israeli drinking coffee by himself. Very unusual—suicide bombers typically try to kill as many people as possible. It’s also odd that no one’s taken credit for it.”
A remark from Moshe Howard came to David: that after the Second Intifada began, he sought out unpopular restaurants, believing that the absence of customers would cause a suicide bomber to move on. “No one will,” David said. “It was an assassination. The victim was Hillel Markis, a member of Ben-Aron’s security detail, and a close friend of Barak Lev’s. I was supposed to meet him.”
Ernheit stared at him. “Let’s get away from the road,” he said. “This is not the day to be standing around with you.”
David drove behind Ernheit along the security fence, climbing a hill to a beautifully terraced community of spacious homes. At the top of the hill was a grassy playground where two girls played on swings; at its edge, wooden benches commanded a view stretching all the way to Tel Aviv. Leaving his car, David followed Ernheit to a bench. “From here,” Ernheit told him, “the housing and land you see hold four million of the seven million citizens of Israel. Before 1967, this was the site of a Jordanian artillery battery. The settlement behind us, Alfe Menashe, was established to claim a strategic point as ours. After forty years, it’s hardly the frontier outpost imagined by most Americans.” Pointing to his left, Ernheit said, “That village on the other side of the fence, less than a mile down this hillside, is Arab. Lev and his settlers also live beyond this fence. It’s the divide between life and death, they believe.”
A muezzin’s call to prayer issued from the Arab village, a thin cry in the
hot, dry air. Ernheit turned to David. “Before or after the bombing, were you followed?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It was good you chose to leave at once. You don’t want people asking how you happened to be there, and who might have sent you. Although it seems that someone knew.”
“I’m no CIA agent, but whoever arranged the meeting was very cautious.”
“Not cautious enough.” Lines of concentration etched the corners of Ernheit’s eyes. “Let’s take your theory,” he continued. “In San Francisco, the assassins’ network disappeared, leaving the Americans with nothing but Hana Arif. In Israel, a member of Ben-Aron’s security detail is killed in a ‘suicide bombing,’ which may leave
you
with nothing but guesswork about Lev. The Israeli link to your ‘conspiracy’ has been cut.”
David allowed deferred emotions to seep through him—helplessness, horror, confusion, fear, and, above all, despair that Hana’s fate might have been planned by someone whose presence he could only sense. “Who’s doing this, Zev?”
“I’ll tell you who’s not,” Ernheit said brusquely. “The Israeli government. No doubt they’re keeping tabs on you. But Israelis believe in the rule of law. At least,” Ernheit added with irony, “like the Americans, within the borders of our own country. If the Mossad wanted to do Markis in, they’d lure him to Monte Carlo.
“Our government may not be anxious to share their leads with you— for good reason, given that your interest may have precipitated Markis’s death. But our people are at least as curious as you are about how Ben-Aron’s security broke down. If they thought this man knew anything at all, they’d very much want him alive.”
“And someone else wanted him dead.”
“Then start with the bomber—an Arab, by all accounts, though if you’re right no one will claim him. The problem with your conspiracy is that it still fails to cohere.” Ernheit smiled grimly. “Remember that insane film Oliver Stone made about the Kennedy assassination? In Stone’s fever dream, JFK was killed not by Lee Harvey Oswald but by Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, Fidel Castro, right-wing Texas oilmen, and gay cross-dressers from New Orleans. The connections made no sense, and you’d have had to rent a hotel ballroom just to get them all together.”
“Oswald,” David said, “
could
have acted alone. JFK was riding in a convertible and his route was public knowledge—all Oswald needed was a rifle and an open window. But Hassan and Jefar needed a lot of help in San
Francisco to supply the uniforms, motorcycles, and explosives. Even that wasn’t enough: they also had to know that Ben-Aron’s route had changed.
“The list of groups who could set up that kind of network in the U.S. is very small. So’s the list of people who could leak a change in route. I need to understand how they got together, and what their motives were. Somewhere there’s an answer.”
Ernheit leaned forward, chin propped on his hands as he surveyed the landscape. “But in Israel? Someone just blew up your witness, and you’re running out of time. Sooner or later our government will place you near the Café Keret. They’ll be very curious. And your invisible helpers will become even more cautious.”
“Then I have to hurry, don’t I?”
“To do what?”
“Meet Barak Lev.”
Ernheit laughed aloud. “Perhaps for lunch? If I follow your rather convoluted logic, someone just killed his coconspirator, making him extremely wary. Or maybe it was Lev who had Markis killed?”
“Not lunch,” David persisted. “Just a meeting. I expect you’re not without ideas about how to arrange one.”
Ernheit shook his head. “Do I really want to be mixed up in this, I wonder? Do you? And what is it you expect from such a meeting? A confession?”
“A conversation. Enough to take to the judge.” David’s tone became urgent. “I can’t wait for your government. Are you really so sure, after today, that whoever is ruthless enough to kill Hillel Markis would have let Hana live if she was guilty?”
After a moment, Ernheit turned to him. Softly, he said, “You’re right, of course. I’m not without ideas.”
B
ack in Jerusalem, restless but exhausted, David did not leave his room at the King David.
He sat up late into the night, the meaning of what little he knew shrouded in obscurity, certain only that the complexities of defending Hana exceeded his resources. No one called. Fearful of surveillance, he did not seek to contact those few people he could identify—Moshe Howard, Avi Masur, Anat Ben-Aron—who might have set him on the path to the Café Keret.
He had taken that path, and a man had died. The guilt David felt— whatever Hillel Markis might have done—was deepened by the fear that someone, tracing his movements, had ordered this murder to prevent discovery of a complex design that had claimed Amos Ben-Aron. In trying to help Hana, he might have sealed her fate.
His only company was television. The authorities were notably reticent: in public, no one connected Markis’s murder to that of Ben-Aron. How long, David wondered, would it take for the government to appear at his door, inquiring about his trip to Tel Aviv?
With Markis dead, David’s only lead was Barak Lev; his only hope was to persuade Judge Taylor that Lev was part of a conspiracy David could not define. Lev was a recluse, hostile to outsiders. Except perhaps through Ernheit, David had no way to reach him. After Markis’s murder, he was not sure that he should try.
Shortly after nine o’clock the next morning, Ernheit appeared at his door. He, too, seemed uneasy. “I keep thinking about Markis,” Ernheit said. “I’ve looked at his murder six different ways. The only way it makes sense is if you’re right. But I’d like to know just what it is you’re right about.”
Like Bar Kochba, Ernheit explained as they drove, the settlement they were visiting lay outside the security barrier, arousing a deep fear of abandonment among those who lived there. But, like Alfe Menashe, it did not conform to the image of a pioneer outpost, peopled by a few Orthodox Jews and fanatics living on the edge; what David saw instead was a lush hillside town of terraced streets, with brightly hued gardens blooming amid palm and jacaranda trees. The sidewalks were brick, the streets well marked, and the school modern, its playground filled with children. The spacious homes, ranch or Mediterranean in style, had the red-tiled roofs distinctive to modern Israel. It was called Sha’are Tikva, the Gates of Hope.
The man they had come to see, Akiva Ellon, was an intellectual beacon of the settler movement. The editor of a magazine that was the voice of the Israeli right, uncompromising in its purity and rigor, he was also known for his connection, if not his unquestioning allegiance, to members of the Masada movement. But far from being unwelcoming or austere, the white-haired man who led them to his garden had a courtly manner, youthful blue eyes, and a faintly humorous expression. No doubt Ernheit’s introduction of David played a role; in his ambiguous description, David was a well-connected American lawyer interested in the settlers’ point of view. His defense of Hana Arif went unremarked.